A classroom full of children sits watching Putin deliver his first direct propaganda address, broadcast to every school in Russia. The subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen, overlayed on the backs of those children. Whether intentional or not, the effect is powerful. We never look at Putin. To follow his words, we are forced to look down, forced to read his decrees across the bodies of the children who will carry the weight of them. The subtitles rest on their backs the way the burden of this war will rest on their backs. Putin speaks from on high, and the cost settles below, onto the small shoulders of kids who have no say in any of it. In a single compositional choice, the film tells us everything about who pays for authoritarian ambition and where our eyes belong.

Authoritarian regimes survive on one thing above all else: total control over what children are forced to watch and absorb, day after day, year after year. The message has to be fed perpetually. Mr. Nobody Against Putin puts that process under a microscope and holds it there.

The Western mind tends to picture Russia as a nation of willing war-supporters, ravenous and violent by nature. Mr. Nobody Against Putin destroys that assumption from the inside. What we see is not a population choosing war, but a school full of innocent children being hypnotized and instructed toward it. We see state control over every screen and every lesson plan. Millions of families told they must sacrifice their young men to go kill, be killed, or be traumatized beyond repair, all for a war that never had to happen.

Pavel, called Pasha, agreed to film it. He agreed knowing that people who oppose Putin get poisoned, thrown from windows, or simply disappear. He pointed a camera and recorded the moment an entire generation of rural and small-town children began to be indoctrinated in real time, then shipped off to the meat grinder. The footage exists because Pasha decided it had to exist. He cares for these kids, which becomes abundantly clear. And the torment of caring that deeply while staying silent behind the lens, of witnessing what can only be called atrocity and having to keep recording, that is a weight I cannot imagine teachers the world over carry in ways we never see.

The sound design reflects this. Pasha’s narration, added in post, carries a bass boost that puts his voice not just in your ear but in your chest. The vibration of his words fills the room, fills your body. Form follows function. The auditory presence mirrors the man’s actual presence as he and his camera bear witness to what these children are being turned into. This was the right call, and it elevates the entire film.

As the film progresses, Pasha’s indignation escalates into something closer to resignation, but not the passive kind. A resignation to war against war itself. We come to understand that wars are not just fought on battlefields. They are fought in the hearts and minds of citizens, and some of those hearts and minds rage so deeply against the propaganda that they must eventually act. And when their actions prove not enough, those actions become more brazen.

Then there is Pavel A., the Bond-villain-looking fellow who could use a sandwich. The state rewards him under the pretense that students chose him as their favorite teacher. Yet in watching the ceremony, we see clearly what his certainly cheated win signals to every other teacher in the room: only through complete fealty to Putin’s totalitarian Russia will you achieve the highest success and honors this society can offer. The carrot and the stick, performed in public, for an audience of people who collectively fear the stick.

This is a film Americans need to see, not just because Russia’s situation is foreign to us, but because the mechanisms on display here, the indoctrination of youth, the weaponization of media, the silencing of dissent, have been accelerating across the United States for years. The divided, sectioned-off Left has offered little unity and even less true fight. Mr. Nobody Against Putin shows where that road ends if nobody stands in the way.