Source: The Conversation – UK
It’s surely no surprise that amid today’s geopolitical turmoil, filmmakers are turning to the events of the cold war for inspiration. A flurry of productions set in the 1980s have been released just this year.
See, for instance, The Brink of War, a political drama focused on the 1986 summit at Reykjavik between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Then there’s action-comedy Mayday, starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh. Polish director Kasia Adamik’s new film, Winter of the Crow, is a welcome addition to this burgeoning genre. It’s an evocative film which skilfully exposes the stifling controls and murderous repression inherent in Soviet-era totalitarianism.
Based on a short story by Nobel prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk and set in December 1981, the film stars the always excellent Lesley Manville as Professor Joan Andrews. She’s a rather blunt British academic invited to give a guest lecture on the other side of the iron curtain, in Warsaw.
The film begins in a world in which Joan is firmly in control – her office in the ivory towers of academia – before shifting to one which is alien and disorientating. The Poland of the 1980s is depicted as a cold, austere and unforgiving place. Joan arrives in a landscape of concrete, blizzards and leaden skies.
After being met at the airport by a young Polish PhD student named Alina (brilliantly played by Zofia Wichlacz) Joan is taken to a university lecture theatre, only to have her talk ambushed by student protesters who are keen to exploit the presence of the press. Joan, ignorant of the severe hardships Poles are enduring, is livid. She is initially indifferent to the students’ cause, believing their fight is not hers. By the following morning, however, the reality of life in the Eastern Bloc becomes all too apparent.
Overnight, in response to growing social unrest linked to a severe economic recession, the Polish government declares martial law. Phone lines are cut, the border is closed and for Joan, trapped in a place that she does not understand, the situation quickly escalates.
She witnesses the heavy-handed arrest of a young mother and then, soon after, sees Alina’s idealist brother, Marek (Jakub Guszkowski), murdered by the secret police (known colloquially as “crows”). What follows is a taut and tense escape thriller in which Joan, Polaroid camera in hand, is pursued through the Warsaw winter by the shadowy agents of the Polish state. Her objective is the safety of the British Embassy and, ultimately, a flight home.
The film is structured around two carefully calibrated parallels. The first is between east and west. The latter is depicted as clean and colourful – a place of red buses and of colleges built of warm sandstone. Glimpsed at the very start, it offers a powerful contrast to the grey monotone of Warsaw.
The second parallel, which Adamik teases out with real skill, concerns the links between Joan’s expertise in psychiatry and the totalitarian police state. It is explored at various points: in the architecture of Warsaw (all those oppressive and state-built tower blocs), in the arresting irony of where Alina seeks refuge at the film’s end (which I won’t spoil here) and in pointed references to the cold war geopolitical context itself.
Early scenes even show a British television journalist explaining the meaning of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction, the cold war nuclear doctrine). The underlying point is clear. The totalitarian police state is a place of hope-suffocating confinement, much like an asylum.
It is also for this very reason though that Joan proves especially well-equipped to find her way to safety. After all, she is an internationally renowned psychiatrist and so understands landscapes of fear and paranoia far better than most. And she has also spent a career successfully navigating life in British academia, an environment often satirised in the 1980s campus novels of authors like David Lodge for its Machiavellian intrigue, rivalries and betrayals.
For Joan, therefore, outwitting professional spies – however cunning and brutal they might be – is relative child’s play.
Amid heightened east-west tensions provoked by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, this is a powerful film for its moment, one which brilliantly uncovers the soul-crushing tyranny of life in an Orwellian police state.
In doing so, it also offers a clear takeaway. For as Joan comes to learn firsthand during the cold winter of December 1981, when it comes to the fight against oppression – and for the right to hope and dream – there can be no bystanders.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
Sam Edwards has previously received research funding from the ESRC, the US Army Heritage and Education Center, and the US-UK Fulbright Commission. Sam is a Governor of The American Library (Norwich) and a Trustee of Sulgrave Manor (Northamptonshire) and of The D-Day Story Museum Trust (Portsmouth).
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/14/winter-of-the-crow-this-taut-escape-thriller-explores-life-under-martial-law-in-cold-war-poland/