CorynAllanRichard

The God of Wrath
 

Logline

A female Soviet sniper and poet in World War II, serving with her sister whom she failed to protect as children, kills the brother of a German colonel whose relentless pursuit of vengeance inspires her poem, “The God of Wrath”, an obsessive force that consumes them both, driving them inexorably through the fetid swamps of Byelorussia, to a showdown in a mighty Baltic fortress.
 

Synopsis

Vera Ivanovna Sannikova is a twenty-five-year-old female Soviet sniper and poet fighting on the Eastern Front in World War II. Her only family is her younger sister Anna, a fellow sniper, driven to fight by deep and passionate faith.

In June 1944, on the eve of a great Soviet offensive to drive German forces out of Byelorussia, Vera recognizes her unit’s battalion political officer, Nikolai Andreyevich Pavlukhin. He is the colonel from Stalin’s secret police, who abducted their father during the Great Purge. He has his eyes on Vera and Anna, expecting them to betray the revolution as their father did.

Thinking an act of heroic daring is the only way to save her and Anna from persecution, Vera partakes in the great offensive against orders.

Vera and Anna’s heroism in the initial attack gives them a place in the liberation of the Byelorussian city of Vitebsk. There, they attack the “Hero Bridge”, a vital choke point and the only escape route for retreating German forces.

German Colonel Heinz Bruno commands the planned breakout from the city. His eager younger brother Walther swears to defend the bridge with his life. But his heroic zeal makes him a vulnerable target, and Vera kills him at the Hero Bridge.

As Walther’s lifeless body crumples in Bruno’s arms, he and Vera lock eyes in the firelight of the burning bridge. Bruno vows revenge, pursuing her through the sweltering summer swamps of Byelorussia. His brutality and obsessive thirst for vengeance inspire Vera to write the poem, “The God of Wrath”.

Setting a trap, Bruno captures Vera and her comrades as they attack a German train outside Minsk. Holding them prisoner in a church, God’s Charnel House, Bruno relives the childhood horrors of abuse at the hands of ecclesiastical authority and kills Anna. He severely wounds Vera, but her friends save her from Bruno’s coup de grâce as he burns the church to the ground.

Succoured by wine and morphine as she recovers in the hospital, Vera accidentally splashes Stalin’s portrait with wine at a party on his birthday. Pavlukhin investigates her for her ‘crime’, while her lover and best friend Lyonya “Lushko” Mikhailovich Luschenko betrays her. Demoted by Pavlukhin to a penal battalion, Vera realizes she has nothing left but to make Bruno pay for killing her sister.

Vera pursues Bruno with her found family of snipers, scouts, and sappers. In the winter of 1945, she must survive the frigid conifer forests of East Prussia and meet him on his own ground. During the siege of Bruno’s home city of Königsberg, their climactic battle rages in a mighty 19^th century Baltic fortress.

Whether Vera kills Bruno, or dies with him, she must learn that they both serve the God of Wrath. Like the fortress, brick and iron encase their savage hearts. This last meeting, on hallowed ground, is inevitable. For it is the heart inviolate that binds them both.