How To Divorce During The War Review: Clinical Lithuanian Satire On Liberal Performance Without Bite Or Fury

In Andrius Blaževičius’ How To Divorce During The War, Marija (Elena Jakštaitė) and Vytas (Marius Repšys) have assembled a life with their daughter Dovilė (Amelija Adomaitytė). Marija’s well-paying job ensures there’s food on the table, while Vytas’ work front has dried up. A filmmaker struggling to get back on his feet, Vytas instead keeps the house in order and maintains the bulk of raising Dovilė. Premiering at Sundance, the Vilnius-set film opens with rupture. One fine day, Marija announces to Vytas she wants a divorce. Vytas is bewildered. He angrily demands to know if there’s someone else. She insists there’s none. She just doesn’t love him anymore. Living with him is miserable and she’s spent months mulling this decision. If she’d planted any cue, he’s totally missed it.

She tells him to move out. But it’s February 2022, and Russia launches its invasion of Ukraine. The couple are confident that Lithuania being a NATO country is safe. But murmurs of the country being next in line grow louder. Predictably, the domino effect of the war rolls right up everywhere around Marija and Vytas. Their reality cannot be so severed despite promising their pre-teen daughter immunity.

Admittedly, How To Divorce During The War does have a veneer of poking satire. When war or equivalent monstrosities erupt elsewhere or close, how do you measure, appraise an honest, heartfelt reaction? How much of pure exhibitionism enters the picture? What’s mostly skewered here is a performative liberal sheen. It binds the couple, whether they confess or deny. Marija and Vytas project being on the side of right. Both make a ruckus about their political convictions. She hosts a displaced Ukrainian family at her house. She basks in her goodness and generosity, putting them all in a single room. However, the endeavour quickly grows to prickle her. She starts to recognise the end of her tether. Marija has all these high-flown ideals untested in the crucible of hard times. She quits her job, clamouring working alongside a Russian branch is ethically non-negotiable. But how sincerely does she subscribe to what she attests? Marija is ostensibly keener on setting an example, being the flag-bearer of the conscientious. But retaining principles firmly through the worst crisis is the most exposing, confronting experience. Quickly, the family’s sight is enough to make her snap and bristle. Of course, she too finally flames an othering accusation, asserting the Ukrainian family is too different.  

Moreover, Vytas upbraids his parents for watching Russian propaganda. He tries out performance protest art, disillusionment hacking in rapidly. There’s an austerity of stance and tone coating How To Divorce During The War. Things seem designed to be grim and dispassionate, almost forbidding. That there’s war happening very close never fails to be impressed on the viewer. But this unyieldingly sober tone doesn’t always go somewhere meaningful or locate a pulse. Just by itself, bleakness isn’t synonymous with rich commentary. The film frequently makes this mistaken correlation, stultifying us in an empty torpor.

Neither is it possible to be sure about the implications made here about a woman who’s had her fill of a performative marriage. When Marija breaks to her husband about the divorce, she flaps about her exhaustion in pretending. She’s weary of playing the cool wife, who’s culturally sophisticated. It’s been sickening to keep up the façade for years of a showy, tasteful marriage. She can do it no more. However, Blaževičius’s screenplay conveniently brushes past these resentments, ultimately impelling her to a functional compromise. It’s annoying how the film freely looks past and consigns her again a sorry fate. There’s too much wallowing in misery and little forward thinking.

Even visually, a strong derivativeness bathes How To Divorce During The War. It has this turgid European formal distance that turns everything anaemic. But you can’t help asking what end do such choices serve this particular film. There’s a danger of the images and effects being flattened and hazed, precisely what happens here. The frosty aesthetics swivel into hollow, dull reiterations. It’s like the husband’s style of films seems to be replicated in the larger schema. Then there’s the odd, scarcely dwelled position of the daughter, visibly overwhelmed by the divorce and war milling together, lashing out at school. Sporadically, Blaževičius recalls her existence, zooming in only for her being admonished or breaking down in private. She becomes a casualty slotted zero thought and consideration in this haphazard, temperamental ego battle between the couple. Blaževičius allows no growth to seep in, rather a toxic reinstatement of the husband getting his way, the wife sinking in resignation. For a film portending jammed hostilities at home and on a larger scale, suggestions here are too perturbing.

Debanjan Dhar is covering the 2026 Sundance Film Festival as part of the accredited press.