Kasia Adamik’s Winter of the Crow is a taut, atmospheric period thriller rooted in one of the darkest chapters of Poland’s recent history. Premiering in Toronto’s Platform section, the feature adapts a short story by Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk and brings it to the screen with unflinching precision, carried by commanding performances from Lesley Manville and Zofia Wichłacz.

The story unfolds in December 1981, on the cusp of Poland’s introduction of martial law. Dr Joan Andrews (Manville), a London-based academic in clinical psychology, travels to Warsaw on a rare official invitation to present her research. Almost immediately, she finds herself in a country simmering with unrest, where the Solidarity movement has stirred hopes of reform but repression is quick to answer. Andrews encounters Alina (Wichłacz), a fragile yet determined student activist, and through her is pulled into the clandestine world of resistance. When martial law is abruptly declared, Warsaw is transformed into a concrete labyrinth patrolled by tanks and militiamen. Stranded, with limited allies — including a cautious British ambassador played by Tom Burke — Andrews must navigate an increasingly hostile terrain, realising that political violence is no longer a distant concept, but a present reality that tests her conscience.

Adamik, co-writing with Sandra Buchta, delivers a lean neo-noir that eschews any embellishment. The bare bones of the narrative are simple: a woman caught on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, forced to survive a game of cat-and-mouse with a regime for which paranoia is policy. Yet the execution itself brims with detail, and the film’s greatest strength lies in its ability to evoke mood. Working with cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk, Adamik drenches Warsaw in shades of grey and black, turning it into a city seemingly devoid of daylight. Whenever the sun pierces through, it is filtered or muted, a reminder of joy glimpsed but denied. Some of the most haunting images come through car windows: fogged-up glass that smudges faces into ghostly abstractions, a visual metaphor for lives erased or obscured under authoritarian rule.

The production design and costumes, equally meticulous, heighten this sense of a “winter of the soul”. Streets, offices and apartments are stripped of colour and warmth, echoing a society suffocated by fear and bureaucracy. The film bears the touch of executive producer Agnieszka Holland, Adamik’s mother and a master chronicler of repression, whose influence seems to permeate both the political urgency and the bleak authenticity of the mise-en-scène.

Performance is where Winter of the Crow really hits its stride. Manville, always a subtle actor, lends Dr Andrews a mix of bewilderment and quiet resilience. She embodies a woman who arrives as an outsider — curious but naïve about the reality behind the Iron Curtain — and who gradually confronts the futility of her professional detachment. Wichłacz offers a striking counterpoint: her Alina is fragile in appearance but fuelled by conviction, a young woman determined to fight even as she risks buckling under pressure.

Technically, Adamik achieves a controlled, confident film, one that avoids excess and maintains its noir-inflected austerity. Yet the final act wobbles slightly. As the narrative closes, it leans into a rhetoric of historical moral clarity that undercuts the ambiguity that had defined the journey so far. The anti-authoritarian message remains powerful, but the originality seen in the preceding chapters weakens in a more didactic conclusion.

Winter of the Crow was produced by Polish outfits Wild Mouse Production and Film Produkcja together with Luxembourg’s Iris Productions and Irish-British firm Film and Music Entertainment Ltd. HanWay Films handles its worldwide sales.