“Klondike” is a stark, immersive drama about being trapped on the front lines of a new war when all hell breaks loose.

The “new war” was the last Russian-backed assault on Ukraine, the so-called “separatists” uprising in Donetsk Oblast, Russian-instigated and Russian-backed. That was in 2014. Writer-director Maryna Er Gorbach builds her “true events” parable around a singular tragedy of that war, the Russian missile that brought down a Malaysian passenger jet over the village of Hrabove.

But that’s just one tragedy facing a very-pregnant Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna) and her ethnic Russian husband Tolik (Sergey Shadrin), who live outside of Hrabove.

He’s frantic to get her out. She’s Ukranian, and almost in denial about what happens all around them as she deflects and changes the subject whenever Tolik tries to hustle her out the door.

Even a “mistake” artillery round that takes out the wall to their living room doesn’t shake her. She goes through the motions of tidying up, weeping with fury.

And it’s not like they can go anywhere. Tolik’s AK-47-wielding pal Sanya (Oleg Shevchuk) has requisitioned it, running errands for “the guys.” Sanya is Russian, guilt-ridden and concerned, not enough to give the car back, but enough to give Tolik instructions — “Kill the cow, the boys are starving” and “sell the chickens” before the undisciplined mob the Russians were paying to revolt stole them.

Sanya even passes on the Russian password to his friend.

And then Irka’s brother Taryk (Oleg Shcherbina) returns to the family farm from Kyiv to urge her out, help where he can and rage at the Russian “separatist” sympathizer brother-in-law whose baby she is carrying.

Fires burn in the distance, gunfire echoes their way every to often, “mistakes” are acknowledged.

“I’ll build back your house,” Sanya promises. “When the Russians arrive, we’ll live like nobles!”

And then the biggest mistake of all happens, a colossal blunder and international incident that reminded the world of Russia’s inability to shed its “villains of history” mantle.

Writer-director Gorbach (“Omar and Us,” “Love Me”) tells this tale out of order, wrong-footing the viewer and forcing us to come to the movie rather than the other way around.

We see the results of the artillery round, the efforts of Taryk to make his sister take cover. What she’s holed-up for only becomes clear when Tolik fixes their TV dish long enough to see what crashed in their village, the bodies scattered far and wide from Flight 17.

There’s ghoulish cell phone video footage of the “separatists” going through the wreckage (Sanya included), desperate to find the black box and cover up their crime.

“Amateurs,” a plainclothes Russian pulling the strings mutters about these camo-clad clowns, at one point.

“I think they should think less and think which side to shoot” Irka fumes at her oft-drunken husband as she goes through the motions of “cleaning my house.”

Taryk is depicted as a hotheaded patriot. But the most interesting character, and most put-upon, is Tolik. Shadrin makes this fellow shellshocked with impotent rage at his ever-lying “idiot” (In Russian and Ukranaian with English subtitles) “friend” Sanya, begging his turning-away-from-him wife and bickering with his shorter, younger brother-in-law.

The confusion that the picture engenders cleverly mimics “the fog of war.” The inhumanity of such blood-feud conflicts depicted here prefigures the fresh Russian atrocities of their latest invasion.

And the shocked inability to focus on what one must do despite the pull of pretending, saying and repeating “it’ll all be over soon” is vividly recreated in this small-scale version of a larger scale tragedy to come.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Oksana Cherkashyna, Sergey Shadrin, Oleg Shcherbina and Oleg Shevchuk.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Maryna Er Gorbach. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:40