Kasia Adamik's film arrives pre-loaded with pedigree: a source story by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, a mother who made The Green Border, and Lesley Manville in a role that could have been written to her exact register of brittle authority. The question isn't whether the raw material is good. It is whether the film knows what to do with it. The setup is a beautifully efficient trap. Professor Andrews — clinical psychologist, dream theorist, proud non-dreamer — arrives in Warsaw to give a lecture and is almost immediately stripped of the tools that define her: her bag, her passport, her itinerary, her exit. Manville plays this with the particular skill of someone who understands that competence collapsing into helplessness is funnier and more frightening than hysteria. The testy, peremptory mannerisms that mark Andrews as someone accustomed to being the most organised person in the room become liabilities the moment the system stops cooperating. The film's best move is making 1981 Warsaw feel genuinely surreal rather than merely grim. A tank appearing in a deserted tower-block wasteland at dawn. Live carp queued for in buckets, destined for the bath. Martial law rendered not as gunfire but as bureaucratic evaporation — the city emptied of logic, passports mattering enormously and meaning nothing. Adamik and Tokarczuk's source material are good at this register: menace distributed through inconvenience rather than violence, the Kafkaesque degradation of an orderly person by a disorderly state. The lecture-hall disruption is the film's most pointed scene — students shouting that Poland itself is the oppressive asylum, upending Andrews's tidy anti-Laingian framework before she's finished delivering it. The irony is clean: she has flown in to theorise about institutional power and immediately becomes its object. Whether the film fully cashes this thematic cheque is less certain. The ideas are present but the film seems more interested in texture and mood than in following them to uncomfortable conclusions. The pacing does lose some of its grip in the middle stretch. Adamik's instinct is clearly towards accumulation — more uncanny detail, more disorientation, more of Manville's precise reactions — and the film is probably twenty minutes longer than its dramatic engine can sustain. The editorial note the Guardian review gently raises is fair: tighter cutting would have cost some of the bizarre texture but bought momentum. As it stands, the film is more intriguing than propulsive, more disquieting than fully resolved. For the right viewer that trade is entirely acceptable.
