There's a certain level of commitment to the righteous political anger that fuels its depiction of the migrant refugee crisis at the Polish-Belarusian border in as horrible, unsanitized a fashion as possible that is fully deserving of the admiration it's going to get. To the point where Agnieszka Holland has basically completely destroyed her relationship with her home country over it and has been compared to a Nazi propagandist by the Polish right-wing; they aren't wrong in the sense that this is a pretty effective, miserable political message movie (they are just wrong about the message itself being a bad one!) and one of the more purely upsetting things I saw at TIFF this year. Showing Polish border patrol beating pregnant women, hurling corpses over barbed-wire fences and letting children drown. Even its more minute political points have some sharpness to them; refusing to turn away from the obvious anti-African and anti-Muslim racism of her country's policies or the ineffectual liberal activism that refuses to do the dangerous, risky work that needs to be done, etc. But I have to say, despite the fact that this has absurdly harrowing, authentic detail with repetition/exhaustion functionally baked into it, at a certain point there are just diminishing returns on this particular style of scripted rhetorical sledgehammer filmmaking. The decision for the black-and-white digital look and convenient inter-connected narrative crossover events both especially feel like they belong more to the Academy school of thought than the anti-establishment docudrama she's otherwise crafting, and I think after a while the way that it has been formally constructed for maximum teary-eyed dramatic punishment accidentally drifts it closer to the realm of monotony than it intends. Still, more directors should be burning bridges with their country's film institutes like this to depict the heinous shit they do.
