Hell Jumper is an unbearably sad film about one man’s mission to help Ukraine: review

Chris Parry was a lad from Cornwall who loved adventure and had a taste for danger. When war broke out in Ukraine in February 2022, he was gripped by a sort of obsessive compassion. It compelled him to go and help the people terrorised and made homeless by Putin’s army. In due course this cost him his life, at the age of 28, in the “grey zone” of eastern Ukraine, a desolate no-man’s land. We’ve heard too little about the British and other foreign nationals who volunteer as humanitarian workers in Ukraine, and Hell Jumper on BBC Two and iPlayer, which tells the story of Chris’s all-too-brief life, explains something of their experiences, their motivations, their bravery and the service they gave their fellow human beings. No one made Chris or the other “hell jumpers” drive into this war – and it’s about time we honoured them.

By all accounts, the young Chris was a sociable, intelligent and sporty type with a restless zest for life – swimming, go-karting and tree-climbing almost from the womb. He would almost certainly have made a fine soldier, though he’d never been near a gun and he never carries one when we see him careering around Ukraine trying to rescue people who’d been left behind as the Russians advanced. Typically they are too old, frail or stubborn to leave their unlit, unheated basements in bombed-out apartment blocks. We learn how, in all, Chris personally gets about 400 individuals out, and we may be sure that few would have survived for long under occupation.

Why did he do it? His parents, Rob and Christine, noticed that though he’d never paid much attention to the news, he began to fixate on the television reports about atrocities in the chaos of Ukraine. To Chris, they say, “you couldn’t stand by and let this happen without trying to help”.

Chris defies the official advice to stay away, he deceives his parents about how hazardous his work is, and becomes the bravest of the brave, taking on evacuation missions that no one else will touch, far too close to the Russians, and far too vulnerable to a stray rocket or a grenade let loose from the ever-present drones.

Hell Jumper is a new kind of documentary, in the sense that it draws on a substantial quantity of Chris’s self-filmed material, plus a tranche of text and voice messages, and social media posts (especially Instagram). These are brilliantly blended with the more traditional testimonies from friends and families, plus the news archive. We don’t hear from generals or politicians; just from carpenters or shop workers who come from all over the world to do their bit for humanity.

The focus, though, is on Chris and his work, encapsulated in his PC, eventually retrieved by his parents. This gives the programme an intimate, autobiographical feel, with the precise dates and times of his movements and activities having the quality of diary entries. It is a story worth telling, even though it will make you cry.

Chris’s commentaries, as he dodges the shells and bomb craters, also lend the story a thriller-like immediacy and tension. Smoking a roll-up and pushing his four-wheel drive Toyota through the mud and the crackling gunfire, Chris looks like the most fulfilled and joyous man alive. A young man in love, too. The most difficult of Chris’s messages are the ones preserved on the phone of the partner who he met in Kyiv, Olya Khomenko, or “cheekbones” as he calls her. They plan to settle down in Ukraine, holiday in Cornwall and have kids, but we see how the closer they get to each other, the nearer he wants to get to the front line, and the more she wants him to stop. When she first meets him, she finds him “a crazy person”, in an engaging way; but when they part after the only Christmas they share together, she takes a picture of this happily besotted lad at the railway station because she feels it might well be the last. So it proves when, a week later, he and a colleague run into the Wagner Group. They are summarily executed – a clear war crime.

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But this is no one-dimensional account of unalloyed valour. Chris never told his parents that he was going away, or where he was, or the risks he was taking. He begged his sister not to tell them the truth – a terrible dilemma for her. Some of the humanitarian volunteers say they made lots of money out of the Instagram accounts, and the policy is to maximise audience-friendly content – rescued kittens and dogs, rather than bewildered Ukrainian pensioners, were the prime clickbait. Some used the proceeds to buy new evacuation vehicles, but there is no clear audit of where the cash goes. To be frank, some of Chris’s former comrades sound a bit like thrill-seekers looking for bragging rights. Still, they save lives and stop people from being maimed, raped and kidnapped by Putin’s army. We see that Chris certainly was driven by a mix of motivations – a compelling sense of injustice but also the adrenaline rushes on his reckless missions of mercy.

Like the Polish airmen who fought in the Battle of Britain in 1940, and the foreigners who joined the international brigades to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, there will always be heroes like Chris Parry who will do the right thing, regardless of reason. This unbearably sad film is part of his memorial; the rest of it lives in the hearts of the strangers he took to safety.

‘Hell Jumper’ is on available on BBC iPlayer