ARCHITECTON - Mark Reviews Movies

Architecton, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 31, 2025

Two groups that will probably get the most out of Architecton are geologists and archeologists. There are a lot of rocks in Viktor Kossakovsky's documentary (so many, in fact, and so much the focus of the film that one quickly realizes how limited the appropriate number of synonyms for the words "rock" and "stone" are). There are also plenty of ruins, both of older civilizations, which is to be expected, and modern-day cities, which are victims to war and natural disasters.

Watching the film is to feel overwhelmed by these sights and the implications of them—partly because Kossakovsky doesn't provide much, if any, direct context for why he's showing them to us until the very end. That feeling, though, is mostly due to the sheer, planetary scale the documentary offers up, simply by way of forcing us to consider the relationship between humanity and its harnessing of the natural world to our benefit, its decimation, and the likelihood that the second one will be more our undoing than our anything else.

There's a lot to take in here, in other words, even if and, in a way, because the filmmakers don't hold our hands through this collection of imagery. It was shot primarily across Europe and the Middle East, but the documentary's sights will be, on a basic level, familiar to everyone. There are big cities, some bustling with activity and construction/demolition projects, while others, like ones in Ukraine and Turkey, are sites of much devastation.

The opening shots here are of a Ukrainian town, as drone-mounted cameras fly toward and survey apartment buildings quite literally ripped in half and exposed, like some sort of real-world cross-section of construction, by explosives. To and fro and up and down the camera moves, showing us the remnants of lives interrupted by war—abandoned apartments exposed to the elements and on full display to anyone passing by these concrete buildings.

Eventually, architect Michele De Lucchi, overseeing a construction project of his own on the property of his home, offers some idea of what we should have been paying attention to throughout the film. It almost feels counterintuitive to point out the subject in a review, simply because the experience of the film is so much about bringing our own thoughts to it and letting the juxtaposition of the imagery make us focus those thoughts on the natural world and how humankind interacts with it. Then again, maybe the late context of the film will help some concentrate on the mostly wordless images in a vital way.

De Lucchi's argument actually comes across as little quaint in the big picture of what the film suggests and implicates, anyway, so it might not matter. His concern is that humanity has shifted from constructing buildings with rock and stone, which had been used for centuries and, indeed, millennia before the invention of cement and the reliance on concrete. To him, composite building materials are an affront to architecture, engineering, aesthetics, and every other thing about which a member of his profession should care.

Beyond that, there's also a practical side to favoring stone over concrete. Take those ancient ruins that become a significant section of the film's imagery. They're located in Lebanon (That fact, apparently, is noteworthy, because they resemble what most people think of when they think about ruins in Greece and Italy—only these designs are older), and even if the structures themselves aren't intact, the building blocks of them—those stone columns and foundations—are still present.

With some work and innovation, someone probably could reassemble these structures with most of the original components. When De Lucchi himself visits some of these ruins, he is astonished to see how precisely people millennia ago could cut rock. If humans back then could do such wonders, imagine what modern people could do with our technology.

Meanwhile, those concrete buildings, deteriorating at a much faster pace and devastated in an instant instead of to centuries of time, couldn't be rebuilt in that way. Instead, the concrete and everything else is dumped into a landfill, as more stones are ground and pulverized and transformed into concrete and some liquid slime that's formed by an automated machine. Kossakovsky's camera gives us close-ups of the rocks and pebbles moving along a series of conveyor belts, almost dancing, and of the landslides and bursts of debris that result from the explosions at a quarry.

It's hypnotic and haunting, especially how those quarries almost look like pyramids from afar. Even in taking away from the natural world, humans seem to instinctually build something—here, turning mountains and the landscape into things that look like structures by way of elimination. There are shots here, cross-cut and imposing negative space upon structures, that make things appear as if they're floating in the vacuum of space or existing amongst the clouds, and one can't help but think of the incomprehensible timeline of Earth compared to humanity's existence on it.

Basically, Kossakovsky might have a more specific point to make, guided by De Lucchi's beliefs about architecture, but Architecton poses much bigger questions and ideas, simply by way of its own enigmatic construction and the surprising richness of its imagery. Yes, a geologist, an archeologist, or an architect would probably take away more from what the film is showing us, but its images of construction and destruction put the world and humanity's existence within it into a clear, sobering, and humbling perspective.

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