'Chernobyl' (2019 mini-series)

'In memory of all who suffered and sacrificed' as a result of the hellish event in the early hours of April 26th, 1986, HBO and Sky UK's Chernobyl is a deeply unsettling masterpiece. 

It starts two years subsequent to the accident, at the Moscow flat of Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), a Kurchatov Institute leader, who was tasked with helping to clean up. 'What is the cost of lies?' he dictates into a recording device, 'if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognise the truth at all'. 

The issue of the 'cost of lies' reverberates throughout Chernobyl, with lies explaining the question that is incessantly asked of just how an RBMK reactor explodes, and with '...secrets and...lies' 'practically...[defining]' the Soviet Union as a whole, according to Legasov. The irony is certainly thick when the initial executive committee convened apropos of the disaster is reassured that the situation is 'stable' and 'well under control', and that there is but 'mild radiation'.

After being taken from Legasov's dwelling to moments just after the explosion, we then witness the initial days and weeks and months that immediately follow. It's only in the fifth and final episode of the drama that we're finally granted the closure of knowing what led up to the crisis, since we are swept into the very sense of disorientation haunting the contemporary scientific sphere.

Undergirding our perturbation is the atmospheric soundtrack, beautifully wrought by Hildur Guðnadóttir. It incorporates noises from a decommissioned power plant that intersperse relentless and searing swells and waves that rise to leave us disquieted.

Though two of the most exquisitely distressing moments in Chernobyl happen when the music is stripped away, and its soundscape is solely defined by the increasingly intensifying crackling of a dosimeter and by heavy breathing muffled by a mask. These comprise of firstly, when three volunteers - Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov, and Boris Baranov - embark on a suicide mission to open a sluice gate valve within the affected reactor, and secondly, when a team of 'bio-robots' are given 90 seconds to shovel graphite off of the burning reactor's roof - both critically saving millions of lives, in the spirit of what Stellan Skarsgård as politician Boris Shcherbina commends as sacrifice timelessly inherent to the people of the USSR. These two junctures typify the harrowing clarity with which suffering is rendered throughout.