Critics reviews

[It] offers a cinematic language that functions as both a hammer and a chisel to crack the notion of the self as a solid substance, to reverberate its rough edges in a new shape: a transformation of female identity against social and contextual expectations.

Amnesiac dramas are common, but Smoczynska manages to escape the cliches by making a complex and hostile film that remorselessly interrogates our assumptions about motherhood.

Anchored by finely grained performances, the work examines with unblinking honesty just how friable the bonds can be not only between spouses, but even between mother and child. It may be a little too honest and chilly for some viewers, but for those who swoon over stark visuals, bleak landscapes and Slavic miserabilism among unhappy families, watching this will feel like every Christmas came at once.

Its controlled expansiveness of tone, psychology and camera mark its helmer — invaluably aided by writer-star Gabriela Muskała — as a stylist of considerable, unpredictable finesse. She could go anywhere from here.