Winter of the Crow: Lesley Manville Brings Cold War Chill to Warsaw

Lesley Manville plays a celebrity dream scholar trapped in 1981 Warsaw in Winter of the Crow, Kasia Adamik's cold war thriller adapted from a story by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk.

The film is set in December 1981, just after General Jaruzelski imposed martial law in response to the Solidarity trade union movement. Part thriller, part Kafkaesque reverie, it recreates what the Guardian's review calls the "sinister drear" of communist Poland, with bizarre and surreal details sharpening the atmosphere.

Who made it, and from what?

Kasia Adamik directs. She is the daughter of Agnieszka Holland, whose film The Green Border earned wide attention. The source material is a story by Olga Tokarczuk titled Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw — Tokarczuk being, notably, a trained clinical psychologist as well as a novelist.

Manville plays Professor Andrews, a British academic clinical psychologist with, in the reviewer's words, "testy, peremptory mannerisms". Her one indulgence is taking Polaroid photos. She has found fame with a book on dreams, despite claiming she never dreams herself.

What happens in Warsaw?

Andrews arrives to deliver a lecture. She begins outlining views on mental illness that echo R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault — anti-psychiatry's greatest hits, essentially. Students then disrupt her speech, shouting that Poland itself is an oppressive asylum.

That disruption is the film's thesis in miniature. An academic who studies the mind visits a country that has, by its own citizens' account, gone mad.

The Guardian's reviewer finds Manville "magnificently on edge" throughout, and calls the film "intriguing". The setting — a tower block wasteland — supplies the visual bleakness; the surreal touches supply the unease.

Why it matters

Tokarczuk adaptations remain rare enough that each one counts, and Adamik's pedigree — plus Manville's casting — marks this as a serious proposition rather than genre filler. A British star, a Polish director and a Polish Nobel laureate, all converging on the darkest month of the Cold War's last decade. The film opens a window onto a period that European cinema keeps returning to, and never quite exhausts.