In The Fog At The ICA

One good thing about working where I do, is that I can leave work at five (or maybe just before) and be in Central London by six (or maybe just after), thanks to the miracle of Shenfield Station. So the other night I was at the ICA easily in time to see In The Fog at 6:15 – in fact, I was too early, and thus had to sit through the ads. The ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts in case you don't know) now seems to have more ads than the Odeon. I appreciate that they have a captive audience, but you have to wonder how well targeted these ads are. How many people who have turned up on a Tuesday night to see a long, slow Russian art-war film set in Nazi-occupied Belarus are seriously ever going to buy a Jeep?

For a start there were only about ten of us, only two of whom knew each other beforehand. A little way into the film an old man in the back row told this couple, who were shifting about, to sit still – they weren't sitting in front of him, but presumably their movement was distracting him. In truth, they had been irritating earlier, talking through the ads and previews. I realise that technically this is allowed, but something in their tone had suggested an unseemly relish, as if they were glorying in their accompanied status.

Later a man in front of me turned round to express his irritation at the ticking of a woman's watch. Even without looking at the screen, you could begin to see how wars start.

In The Fog is one of those art movies so serious that it sometimes threatens to tip over the edge into self-parody, as when a woman begs her husband (who is being taken off to be shot): 'At least take an onion with you.' And there is occasionally a sense that the camera is lingering slightly too long over things that don't always justify being lingered over. For example, a crow.

However, it's often very effective in detailing the way war turns people into different versions of themselves. Are these versions more truthful, or are they more like distorted caricatures? This is the question. Our hero ends up trudging through the woods with a corpse on his back, like an allegorical figure of guilt, even though he has nothing to feel guilty about. Probably.

Eventually, an actual fog does roll in, obscuring the film, or further obscuring it, and we are left with the sound (SPOILER ALERT) of the hero shooting himself (everyone else is dead). The credits then roll over the sound of the wind in the trees, birdsong, and faint accordion music – very effective, and yet there's a part of me that wishes they'd played When The Going Gets Tough (The Tough Get Going) by Billy Ocean over the closing credits. It would have been a bold decision, but I think it would have paid off.