THE STORY – Based on a short story by Nobel Prize–winner Olga Tokarczuk, the latest from director Kasia Adamik is a thrilling cat-and-mouse game set on the eve of Poland’s Martial Law era in 1981, starring Academy Award nominee Lesley Manville.
THE CAST – Lesley Manville, Tom Burke, Zofia Wichlacz
THE TEAM – Kasia Adamik (Director/Writer) & Sandra Buchta (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 112 Minutes
“Whoever comes to Warsaw in December is either a fool or has a death wish.”
This chilling line isn’t just a warning – it’s reality, and it perfectly captures the tone for Kasia Adamik’s harrowing, deeply atmospheric Cold War thriller, “Winter of the Crow.” Based on the short story by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, the film is bleakly captivating, set against the suffocating backdrop of Poland on the brink of martial law. With Lesley Manville delivering one of her most quietly ferocious performances to date, the film is a slow-burning descent into paranoia, state surveillance, and unintended resistance.
Manville plays Dr. Joan Andrews, a British academic who arrives in Warsaw in winter 1981 to deliver a lecture on clinical psychology. The film’s opening is a bit misleading, with an ultimately abandoned subplot about funding and a daughter-like assistant that never resurfaces. (It could actually be Joan’s daughter, but that part is never clear.) This early stumble is misleading because it gets you thinking that you’re in for a talky period drama about academia. Turns out, it’s far from that. Once Joan’s plane touches down and her luggage goes missing, it’s clear that this isn’t going to be the trip she imagined.
Alina (Zofia Wichłacz), a passionate student and local activist, acts as Joan’s guide – both into Warsaw and into a boiling underground of dissent. When Alina orchestrates a protest that hijacks Joan’s lecture, with protesters chanting, “We all live in an asylum,” the political stakes explode. Joan feels humiliated. She’s fought for decades to be respected in a male-dominated field. But she soon finds herself thrown into a different fight, which only escalates when she becomes a target.
Joan, whose anxiety is palpable from the start, finds herself navigating grey concrete apartment blocks, snow-covered streets, and an itinerary that rapidly unravels. Instead of hotel rooms and intellectual discourse, she is pulled into a tense, unpredictable cat-and-mouse game with the secret police, ominously referred to as “the Crows.” Their presence, both literal and metaphorical, haunts every frame.
Real crows flap overhead, watching, circling. They symbolize death, misfortune, wisdom, and surveillance all at once, weaving their own meaning into this reality. The film makes excellent symbolic use of these birds, but never leans too much into it. Like Joan, we’re left to interpret their meaning in a world where nothing is clear and danger is constant.
Tomasz Naumiuk’s cinematography is deliberately cold and muted, pushing toward black and white without ever needing to go there. It perfectly captures the bleakness of winter in Soviet-era Warsaw, a place where tanks roll through neighborhoods and flickering lights signal that danger is imminent. At one point, the phone lines are cut. A woman is dragged from her home. Joan hides behind a door as the Crows knock, question, and vanish into the shadows. The anxiety is relentless – and this is where the film truly thrives.
“Winter of the Crow” shifts quickly into thriller territory. Dream sequences, especially one where Joan is trapped in a concrete labyrinth, heighten the psychological pressure. She’s chased through grey streets, dodges the Crows, and becomes the accidental possessor of damning photographic evidence. Her beloved Polaroid, introduced early on as she takes a selfie, becomes her greatest weapon – and her greatest liability.
The final stretch is agonizing. Joan is cold, sick, lost – a woman pushed far beyond her professional comfort zone, fighting for survival in a country cracking under its own weight. Using photographs to communicate past the language barrier is a clever touch, and watching her use her photographs to piece together various connections feels like assembling a psychological jigsaw puzzle in real time.
Lesley Manville is a formidable presence throughout. Her Joan is composed but increasingly fractured – you can see the exhaustion in her posture, the fear in her silence, the calculation in her stillness. It’s a magnetic, nuanced performance that holds the film’s center as it spins ever closer to chaos.
While the tension ratchets up effectively in the second and third acts, the pacing does suffer in places. A few quiet interludes linger a touch too long. Still, these are minor stumbles in an otherwise gripping ride. “Winter of the Crow” is a film about repression, disillusionment, and the quiet courage of being in the wrong place at the right time. Joan’s journey toward resistance is not heroic in the traditional sense – it’s reluctant and terrifying. By the time the crows (both human and plumed) circle one final time, you’ll feel like you’ve lived through a psychological war. But it feels oddly worth it.
