Silent Land (Cicha ziemia)

A bourgeois Polish couple’s relationship disintegrates during a stressful Italian vacation, in Aga Woszczyńska’s richly observed feature debut.

When a perfect couple rents a holiday home on a sunny Italian island, the reality does not live up to their expectations as they find out that the pool in the house is broken. Ignorant of the fact that the island faces water shortages, they ask for someone to fix it. The constant presence of a stranger invades the couple’s idea of safety and starts a chain of events, which makes them act instinctively and irrationally, heading to the darkest place in their relationship.

From the first scenes, Woszczyńska establishes an atmosphere of dread, as if summoning the moods of Antonioni and Haneke and channeling them through her own blistering perspective on human frailty. Each scene is precise, each frame as refined as the couple’s grooming and fitness regimens. But as the police continue to pull at loose threads in their story, and as the unpredictable nature of the town and its people continue to unsettle them, fissures open up between the two. Woszczyńska offers an unblinking gaze at the small steps leading downward to moral collapse.