An absorbing and provocative documentary, sometimes featuring moments of graphic violence, the evocatively titled Hell’s Army follows the brutal rise of the Russian mercenary Wagner Group and its bloody work from the Donbas in Ukraine through to Syria, Libya and the Central African Republic, before its brutal return to full-scale war in Ukraine.
Dissident Russian journalist Katya Hakim from the Dossier Centre chases the world’s most feared mercenary army across the globe as she aims to unmask this new model of violence and its brutal leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, with the help of Denis Korotkov, an exiled St Petersburg police detective.
The determined Hakim travels the world to various war zones, examines graphic video footage featuring Wagner Group atrocities and tracks the origins of the mercenary group, while Korotkov – sporting enigmatic dark glasses which hide a damaged eye – is mainly seen interviewing former Wagner Group members, some of whom offer bluntly dark insight into the way the group works.
As we see, Hakim is stuck on a dead-end beat in Syria when she’s sent to cover a mysterious battle – known as the Battle of Conoco Fields – in the Syrian Civil War in 2018, and stumbles upon the operations of a violent mercenary company that films the torture and killing of their enemies. Tracking them to the Donbas region of Ukraine, the name Wagner is overheard as Ukrainian forces tap into battlefield radio messages from the group.
Director Richard Rowley does a fine job of offering disturbing insight into Wagner activities. They have long featured on news reports from war zones, but the film’s powerful interviews with former members expose the sheer level of brutality of group members.
By the end of 2022, its strength in Ukraine had grown from 1,000 to between 20,000 and 50,000, with Prigozhin – who admitted to leading Wagner in September 2022 – getting closer and closer to a certain Vladimir Putin. Things get all the more personal for Hakim when three colleagues are killed, with suspicion falling very much on Wagner men.
As was widely reported, matters took a change of course when Progozhin started to make outbursts about the lack of support from Russian generals as he sought munitions and assistance, eventually stating that the Russian government was lying about the reason for the invasion. He then made the bizarre move of seizing the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and leading a Wagner convoy towards Moscow, saying he would blockade the city. As the dry Korotkov comments, “he accused his bosses of being gangsters.“
Likewise, to them, Prigozhin had become the perfect embodiment of Russia’s mafia state. In August 2023 he was killed together with Wagner commanders in a plane crash, but it is not the end, with remnants of the Wagner Group dispersed around the world, some admitting to joining Western mercenary groups. The face of warfare – according to Hakim and Korotkov – has changed forever.
As the film’s opening on-screen quote from Antonio Gramsci says: “The old world is dying, and the new world cannot be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
Ukraine-Syria-Central African Republic-Lithuania-US, 2026, 92mins
Dir/scr: Richard Rowley
Production: Evergreen Productions, The Dossier Centre, Midnight Film
International sales: Midnight Film
Producers: Richard Butler, Atanas Georgiev, Odessa Rae, Rebecca Teitel, Caitlin McNally
Exec producers: Scott Norville (Evergreen Productions), Kris Kucinskas and Maria Logan (The Dossier Centre)
Cinematography: James Butler, Richard Rowley, Tim Grucza, Denis Sinyakov, Scott Munro
Editor: Atanas Georgiev
Music: Brian McOmber
