Anyone who has seen her seething Oscar-nominated performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” knows that Lesley Manville can be hard as nails on screen — though it’s a register the British veteran tends to play only in support, as her larger showcase roles, from “Another Year” to “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” usually put more fragile vulnerability to the fore. That “Winter of the Crow” places her front and center as a tough, resourceful protagonist in testing circumstances is reason enough to value Kasia Adamik‘s taut, frostbitten Cold War thriller, though the film’s pleasures extend beyond that one key casting coup.
The premise, on the face of it, is a familiar one, in line with dozens of political thrillers about hapless outsiders caught up in webs of systemic corruption. The setting is Warsaw in the winter of 1981, when Poland was placed under martial law by its communist government in an attempt to quash the rising pro-democratic Solidarity movement. Trapped in the process is Joan Andrews (Manville), a respected British psychology professor visiting the city’s university for a guest lecture on the very weekend of this seismic turn of events — though she’s not in any way a political player, her accidental witness status and potential access to foreign media place a major target on her back.
A brisk, brittle type, married to her work and shown being somewhat high-handed with her colleagues in a brief, London-set preamble, Andrews takes early signs of disorder and unrest in Poland as a personal affront. When her luggage fails to turn up at Warsaw airport, she takes out her irritation on Alina (an excellent Zofia Wichlacz), the sharp young student and activist assigned as her assistant for the duration of her visit. Alina again takes the blame when Andrews’ lecture that evening is rowdily disrupted by Solidarity student protesters: Revolution is little more than an inconvenience to the outsider, whose intellectual concerns don’t extend to the political landscape of the country hosting her. Before the weekend is out, however, she’ll be forced to pay more attention.
Put up for the night not in a hotel but in a drab high-rise apartment belonging to Alina’s parents — another point of annoyance — the piqued professor is instructed to await a morning pickup by Alina’s brother, though he never arrives. Instead, she happens to witness and photograph a murder by the police, and narrowly escapes with her own life. Suddenly on the run, with no papers and her minders either dead or gone AWOL, Andrews must navigate her way to safety through a strange, blizzard-hit city suddenly under violent new management, with little way of telling friend from foe. Even a British ambassador, played with oily unreadability by the ever-welcome Tom Burke, isn’t quite as straightforwardly comforting as you’d hope.
It’s a nervy waking nightmare, with our heroine’s disorientation emphasized by the grainy charcoal textures of Tomasz Naumiuk’s cinematography and Aleksandra Kierzkowska’s superb, nicotine-stained production design — which combine to make early-Eighties Warsaw a scruffy Brutalist labyrinth in which even the right turns feel like wrong ones. The brutal December winter, meanwhile, earns its title billing, bearing down on the action with tangibly clammy force, shortening breath and tempers alike.
Adapting a short story by Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, Adamik and co-writers Lucinda Coxon and Sandra Buchta keep the action driving and urgent, and the characterisation spare — pretty much every figure here holds some degree of mystery, and that extends to Andrews herself, whose full capabilities (as well as previously hidden reserves of empathy) only emerge under extreme pressure.
Manville carries the film with an air of increasingly raw determination, the professor’s entitlement and irritability giving way to unblinking self-preservation instincts when required. It’s bracing to see the star at the centre of a story that would more commonly take the form of a wrong-man noir; like Emma Thompson in another frostily title thriller this year, “Dead of Winter,” she demonstrates the underestimated power of a woman who’s lived long enough to weather the cold.
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