Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kasia Adamik
Starring: Lesley Manville, Tom Burke, Zofia Wichłacz, Andrzej Konopka
Political thrillers aren't usually headlined by 70-year-old British actresses, but that's exactly what we get in director Kasia Adamik's Winter of the Crow, treating viewers to the sight of Lesley Manville outrunning secret police, getting involved in car chases and strangling a villain with a clothesline. In Phantom Thread, Manville's character warned Daniel Day Lewis that she could easily take him in a fight, and on the evidence of Winter of the Crow, we believe her.
Set in 1981 and adapted by screenwriter Sandra Buchta from a novel by Olga Tokarczuk, Winter of the Crow sees Manville play Dr Joan Andrews, a frosty English academic who naively accepts an invitation to deliver a series of lectures in Warsaw. Her trip gets off to a bad start when her luggage goes missing, and it gets progressively worse for Joan, who isn't the sort of person who deals with hardship very well. Her opening lecture is thrown into chaos when student protestors hurl toilet rolls onto the stage. The hotel room she was promised turns out to be a flat in an especially grim tower block. Joan's guide, young student Alina (Zofia Wichlacz), takes her passport and ticket and promises to return the following morning with her retrieved luggage.
The next morning arrives, but not Alina. Looking out her window, Joan is greeted by the sight of a tank in the courtyard. The phone lines are down and there are heady pronouncements on the radio that Joan can't understand. Unbeknownst to her, martial law has been declared, and with it the closing of the borders. Joan is stuck in Warsaw for now.
Joan decides to make the most of a bad lot by documenting the scenes with her Polaroid camera (a device that fascinates the locals). When Alina's brother Marek shows up to retrieve Joan, he is pushed from a window (a method of execution that persists in post-Soviet Eastern Europe today) by a member of the secret police, falling to his death on the icy ground below. Joan captures the grisly details of the incident, including the identity of the killer, on her camera. This makes her the most wanted woman in Warsaw.
The ensuing drama plays like The Killing Fields by way of Kafka as Joan attempts to find a way out of Warsaw but is thwarted at every turn. She is aided by members of the resistance, including friends of Alina, but they are understandably so preoccupied with freeing their country from tyranny that helping this old British lady isn't exactly their number one priority. Displaying a classic "Brits abroad" attitude of entitlement, Joan grows increasingly frustrated with her hosts. What makes Winter of the Crow stand out from most political thrillers is that its hero isn't simply apolitical, but she has no real clue of what she's gotten herself involved in. Manville is unsurprisingly excellent as a woman who has no interest in becoming a hero of another nation's people, but if she can get her damning Polaroids out of Poland, she just might become one.
Much of the suspense comes from the audience being more clued in than Joan. While Joan can't understand Polish, the Polish dialogue is translated for us via subtitles. We're privy to the full extent of the radio broadcasts and TV pronouncements by men in uniform, so we know exactly how much trouble Joan is really in if the authorities catch up to her.
Adamik, who is the daughter of Polish cinema giant Agnieszka Holland, and Buchta pepper their film with little details that hammer home the harshness of living in the Poland of this era. The toilet rolls initially hurled at Joan are immediately collected and re-rolled, given the scarcity of such a luxurious product. The movie is set in the days before Christmas, but with turkey off the menu the locals keep live carp in their bath tubs for the big day. Cigarettes are the primary form of currency, adding to the idea of Warsaw as one big prison. Cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk drains the colour from a time and place that probably wasn't all that colourful, giving '80s Warsaw the imposing look of Gotham City.
There are other touches that don't quite work. An explanation offered for Joan's recurring dream of a crow is eye-rolling, while there is a major plot hole concerning the villains' baffling failure to exploit a perfect opportunity to nab Joan's incriminating pictures. But for the most part this is an entertaining throwback to the Cold War thrillers of the past, enhanced by Manville's harried performance as a carp out of water.
Winter of the Crow is in UK/ROI cinemas from October 16th.
