Urszula Antoniak

Beyond Words

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Jakub Gierszal as Michael

The immigrant experience. Be honest, your heart just sank a little. Possibly because you’ve seen a few movies about it and you imagine you know what you’re about to be served when you hear that Beyond Words (Pomiędzy słowami, in the original Polish) is just such a thing. The tale of a sweet and blameless brown person having a hard time in a mostly white country. But that’s not what Urszula Antoniak’s fourth film is about at all. Instead it asks a rarely asked question – what of the not-so-sweet, not-so-blameless white person in another largely white country? Michael looks like a German but he isn’t one. He’s a Pole who immigrated to … Read more

Nude Area

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Naomi naked in the shower

Films about falling in love have been done so often that the way the characters in them declare their love has become incredibly important. How does “I love you. You complete me” compare to “Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches…” or “I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her”? Top marks for spotting Jerry Maguire, The Princess Bride and Notting Hill. Love stories depend for success on a lot of things – but emotional plausibility and the romantic stars aligning need good writing and chemistry to take things over the line. … Read more

Splendid Isolation

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Hannah semi-buried on the beach

At first, Splendid Isolation, Urszula Atoniak’s latest film, looks like it’s going to be a retread of 2009’s Nothing Personal, her first one. Nothing Personal might even have been called Splendid Isolation and its MO was the same – a couple of people, a female focus, a remote location, self-sufficiency, personal histories mired in mystery, with flat grey skies and the whole thing shot on a 16mm film camera with half an eye on the picturesque. Here we start with two young women on beach. One of them appears to be rolling around in the waves on what looks like a cold day. Are they playing or have they just washed ashore? The … Read more

Nothing Personal

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Lotte Verbeek

Working my way in no logical order through the films of the under-rated Urszula Antoniak, I come to her first feature, 2009’s Nothing Personal. And it’s nearly all here – the female focus, the quiet way of working, the absence of unnecessary detail, mood rather than plot being her primary concern, and great performances just to top it all off. What isn’t quite here is Antoniak’s sudden ta-daa moment, the moment in Code Blue (2011) or Magic Mountains (2020) when she suddenly racks all the knobs to the max, to shocking effect. It could be, of course, that those films are atypical. There are another three films, at the time of writing, to … Read more

Code Blue

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Bien de Moor as Marian

Code Blue is the second of six (as of June 2023) features by Poland-born, Netherlands-based film-maker Urszula Antoniak, and the second one I’ve seen. The first one I saw, Magic Mountains, was made in 2020, nine years after Code Blue but both feature single women locked in near-mortal struggles, with intimacy an issue. Does that make this a feature of her work or a coincidence? Three’s a trend, as they say, so I don’t know. Either way, Antoniak is someone to watch. She has a way with space and sound, and on the evidence of the work I’ve seen, makes stylish films bristling with menacing moods and atmospheres of psychological imperilment. There is … Read more

Magic Mountains

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Hannah in danger of falling

So you broke up with someone and now they’ve got in touch to ask you if you’d like to go climbing with them, just like the two of you used to. One last hurrah, kind of thing, a farewell to all that. You decide to go, though it doesn’t seem like a very good idea. Before anything else happens, Urszula Antoniak’s Magic Mountains, a brooding yet brief (only 81 minutes) exercise in mood management, has to explain why Hannah (Hannah Hoekstra) would accept this invitation from former boyfriend Lex (Thomas Ryckewaert) to go to the Tata mountains in Slovakia. Antoniak does it adroitly, in a scene which establishes the entire mood of the … Read more