J Paul Johnson
Today, February 20, 2026, marks the four-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine. Not coincidentally, today also heralds the release of the new documentary Meduza, charting one of the more uncommon life-imitates-art narrative arcs in recent memory. Its subject, the Ukrainian singer, artist, and actor Pavlo Aldoshyn, had once played a sniper in a feature film called Sniper: The White Raven; what he learned on that shoot led him to be recruited as a sniper when the war began on this day in 2022. As of today, four years into the war, Aldoshyn is still serving, defending his homeland.
There, Aldoshyn had been a well-known public figure, starring in film and television roles, competing on Ukraine’s version of The Voice, and directing his own video art projects. His wife and frequent collaborator, Katarina Leonova, a singer, is featured as well in interviews in Meduza, reflecting on his experience. The two contribute some pre-invasion footage, but most of Meduza’s content consists of interviews with Aldoshyn, Leonova, and perhaps a dozen other figures across the globe whose stories are—tenuously, I’ll note—connected to Aldoshyn’s.
Director Roc Morin, who had been reporting on the conflict between Ukraine and Russia beginning in 2014 with the occupation of Crimea, met Aldoshyn while he was on a brief leave from the front line, and undertook the project with his producer Leïla Wolf (who passed away in January). Morin’s interviews with Aldoshyn are conducted in Kyiv, Kharkhiv, sometimes near the ongoing battles, and the film is devoted in part to charting the devastation of the conflict upon the Ukrainian people.
Aldoshyn is an interesting figure. The camera loves him. His furrowed brow weighs heavy over his piercing stare, and his strong jaw, when it is not clenched in a grimace, eases often enough into a friendly smile. One can easily imagine, from seeing clips of his performances, him as a dashing figure—a modern swashbuckler of sorts. When he speaks of his time in battle, he does so almost exclusively as an artist/philosopher, in figurative language, using metaphor and allusion to characterize his movements as similar to those of the animals with whom his spirit is kindred.
Meduza‘s content in regards to Aldoshyn’s experience consists exclusively of this series of interviews, alongside a few reenactments of Aldoshyn in combat fatigues, hiding in the brushes or examining his weaponry. Unlike a more traditional documentary, Meduza eschews direct exposition, save for a minute or so, about Aldoshyn’s service in particular or the war more generally. We do not hear, say, from any of his co-combatants, nor are there any expository sequences charting the history or status of the war more generally.
What Morin aims for with Meduza is more oblique and aesthetic than simple exposition, both in the interview sequences with Aldoshyn and Leonova and in the rest of the film’s content. While Aldoshyn speaks in figurative language to his dreams, philosophies, and feelings, Morin juxtaposes these segments with others across the globe: a Japanese widower recounts his searching the ocean for his wife in the wake of the 2011 tsunami; a statue-maker rues his son’s unwillingness to continue his legacy; an American art curator reflects upon his family history; an Amazonian tribesman describing the loss of a mythical ladder uniting earth and sky; and, in Kyiv, a museum curator opines about the life of the jellyfish, the amorphous ocean creature from whom the film takes its unlikely name—Meduza translates directly as jellyfish.
Collectively, these secondary segments speak to the devastations of war on an intimate, individual level. It’s an approach to storytelling that is even more unusual than Aldoshyn’s extraordinary story itself. The film’s visual art is nonpareil, with exquisitely haunting cinematography charting the culture, spirit, and grit of Ukraine’s people. A sequence with a local beekeeper whose home and tract are hollowed out by mortar fire is just one of several deeply affecting stories. Yet, when the film ventures afield to tell the stories of others, elsewhere, even its impressive cinematography and sprightly editing can’t quite connect these people and their experiences to Aldoshyn’s.
The narrative struggles to convey Aldoshyn’s experience, his transition from actor to soldier, from playing a sniper to being a sniper, is evident from the very start. Meduza opens with voiceover from an unknown figure describing an out-of-body experience in the wake of mortar fire, then segues to a montage as mortar shells are forged in a Pennsylvania foundry. Both sequences are arresting, but connections between them and Aldoshyn, who speaks to his own experience only in the most figurative of terms, are tenuous. Meduza takes its title from the jellyfish, and Aldoshyn at one point likes his own existence to that of the ocean creature, but the film’s narrative threads are as tenuous as the invertebrate’s fragile tentacles. As intrinsically interesting as the tangential stories may be, few of them directly enlighten Aldoshyn’s experience or that of the Ukrainian people more generally.
One can see in Meduza Aldoshyn’s physical and psychological transformation over the course of its two years of filming: the young, confident artist who competed on The Voice and performed in films and videos is a memory, replaced by the haunted, more hollowed visage of a man whose involvement in the war has complicated his spiritual mythology and relationships. It’s that aspect of Meduza that works best, forming the essence of the film and depicting the harrowing costs of a war that like so many others never should have been started and looks, at times, never to end.
