a fascinating, smart Cold War thriller by Polish director Kasia Adamik. Academy Award nominee Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread, The Crown) plays Professor Joan Andrews, a British professor who comes to Poland in the mid-80s to give a lecture on psychiatry at a university in Warsaw. She’s pretty self-absorbed and can’t seem to wrap her head around the dire straits of the people around her, who are politically oppressed and can scarcely afford to eat. A university student, Alina (Zofia Wichlacz), who invited her, is acting as her host, but she’s also a political activist and a key player in the resistance movement to communism. Professor Andrews is upset when her luggage is lost, her lecture is interrupted by protests, and she’s given a couch to sleep on instead of being put up at a hotel. The next morning, her world is turned upside down as martial law is declared, tanks invade, and her hosts are nowhere to be found.-Film Threat
“Manville carries the film with an air of increasingly raw determination”-Variety
