The specific brilliance of Lesley Manville had been on display for those who knew where to look long before her first Oscar nomination. She’d been part of the enviable Mike Leigh troupe (her first nomination should have been for Another Year) and a permanent small-screen fixture, even if the size of her roles hadn’t correlated to the size of her talent. But after Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s singular magnum opus, Manville has enjoyed a spectacular boom, a long-deserved reward for her and an even bigger one for those of us watching.
The role came as she was entering her 60s, a period that can often leave female actors with grimly limited options, but she’s bucked the trend, not just through the sheer amount of work she’s found but also the unusual variety. She’s avoided the post-Book Club subgenre of mostly patronising comedies that squander older actors on pained pratfalls and found herself in far more interesting, and challenging, territory. She was a wife experiencing later stage sexual dissatisfaction in I Am Maria, a vicious Ma Barker type reigning over a North Dakota family of criminals in Let Him Go, a gun-toting ayahuasca-farming jungle doctor in Queer, the devious antagonist of the spy series Citadel, a cleaner turned fashionista in Mrs Harris Goes to Paris and an OnlyFans stripper in Ryan Murphy’s Grotesquerie. It’s hard to think of many post-Oscar recognition careers that have been quite so uniquely rewarding.
She was last at the Toronto film festival with a cruelly small role in Patrick Marber’s cruelly underwhelming trifle The Critic but returns with a welcome lead, switching it up again with the tense cold war thriller Winter of the Crow. She plays Joan, a British professor of psychiatry heading to Poland to speak at a conference, hoping to share her provocative thoughts on treating mental illness. But while she was steeling herself for backlash from academia, she wasn’t expecting a student uprising, her big moment stolen by those wishing to speak out against the government. Her annoyance at both the protesters and her treatment (lost bag, no hotel, a night on the couch) soon dissipates when she starts to realise something bigger is going down around her. She’s landed near the end of 1981 as the country prepares to enter martial law …
The unfolding awfulness of her situation, as a language disconnect and increasingly barbaric forces shrink her from slightly haughty academic to panicked woman on the run, makes for a nervy and immediately involving thriller. Director Kasia Adamik (daughter of Agnieszka Holland and storyboard artist for Catwoman and Battlefield Earth!) blurs the line between the stark reality of her predicament and the horror of a recurring nightmare, an inescapable maze of brutalist greyness, danger at every corner. It’s all very dank and murky but there’s a real jolt to the initial cat-and-mouse chase as we watch a woman of proud competence realise she’s unable to rely on her usual armory. Adamik’s decision to provide subtitles to characters she can’t understand is initially alienating, taking us out of our heroine’s head, but it’s a decision that grew on me, a smart way of increasing tension and reminding Joan of the narrowness of her world.
Her journey is first physically exhausting and then morally challenging as she must figure out what she believes in and how far she’s willing to go for the greater good, an inner conflict that lands her at the feet of Tom Burke’s shady British ambassador. An earlier scene of her in England, letting down a frustrated student, is a little rushed and confusing but eventually feeds into a through-line of Joan realising she needs to respect and connect to the political desires of those younger than her. It doesn’t quite fall into place as I think the makers intended – the pace sags in the middle, there’s some limply mechanical delivery of backstory and there’s the use of a Polaroid camera to conveniently capture evidence that starts to stretch credulity – but it all builds to a quietly rousing plane set piece, a far more muted version of the Argo finale. Since 1981, the story of an intrepid rebellion fighting back against an authoritarian government hasn’t ever lacked relevancy but it’s obviously an easy story to get behind at this particular moment.
Adamik, working from a short story by Olga Tokarczuk, isn’t always able to keep us in her grip, but Manville, driven and determined as ever, never lets us go.
