Black Sunflowers (2026) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for each introduction
Take a Drink: for thrill-seeking behavior
Take a Drink: for the realities of war
Do a Shot: for bangers
Do a Shot: for near brushes with Death
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
There have been no shortage of standout documentaries about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in part because it may be the most terminally online conflict ever to date.
Black Sunflowers does include battlefield footage, but has different things on its mind, profiling a wide swathe of young people whose youth has been consumed by this war.
A Toast
It’s been 5 years of war as of the introduction of the film, and its effects are immediately obvious on the youth. We’re first introduced to a group of kids, really in the city, as they party and drift their cars across the slick black nighttime streets. This is not the only thrill-seeking behavior we’ll see from this group, which consists both of veterans and those who’ve not yet served. There’ll be more partying, more abandon when the future is so unsure.
Director James Marcus Haney, an American working with a Ukrainian crew, has a music video background, which shows both in his excellent eye and his usage of music here, affecting and effective as a clearly integral part of so many young people’s lives, no less these youth.
What he captures is also strikingly unvarnished and not at all jingoistic- some youth talk about how they are dodging the draft as best as they can (every male from 25-60 is eligible, prohibited from leaving the country, and can be conscripted at any time), others about what killing a man for the first time took from them, how they are now addicted to adrenaline, how even though grievously wounded they would rather be back at the front than stuck at home- what is there even to do there?
As we pass from person to person, testimony to testimony, the staggering scope of the story Haney is after here emerges. He’s seemingly after every possible reaction to life during war he can find while also telling the story of this particular one. Scenes like cataloguing the corpses of Russian casualties tells us about the people they used to be, their motivations to fight, but also how commonplace the sight of death has become to those doing this work. Later people are palpably resigned when Trump is elected, then USAID’s gutting eliminates rehabilitation and prosthetics funding- we even see someone watching that infamous Oval Office meeting. The hard cut Haney employs from that soulless husk Vance’s blather to someone loudly unloading their automatic rifle clip is pretty cathartic, though.
Beer Two
There are times, or particularly people, you wish the film delved deeper on, but that’s not what Haney is going for here- hopping between a large number of people and perspectives is much of the point.
Verdict
Black Sunflowers is a devastating yet not unhopeful portrait of a generation indelibly changed by the Ukraine War, in ways that will reverberate for their lifetime.
