Tomasz Wasilewski brings an icy compositional control to this piercingly sad, strange and unnerving film, about a quartet of lives immersed in toxic obsession and thwarted erotic yearning. It concludes on a stab of what I can only describe as horror and despair. This film is not here to make you feel good. But it has a soap-operatic watchability. Poland in 1990 is the setting, just as the Soviet empire is collapsing. But so far from experiencing a liberation, the characters are only further oppressed by inner desperation, and the title is not entirely ironic. They are in fact “united” by very similar symptoms. There is a kind of eroticised sickness in the air, a compulsive, joyless need for sex. Agata (Julia Kijowska) has a futile obsession with the local priest; headteacher Iza (Magdalena Cielecka) has had a long-standing affair with a married doctor and expects him to formalise their relationship now that his wife has died. Her sister Marzena (Marta Nieradkiewicz) is a former beauty queen and wannabe model – and a teacher, Renata (Dorota Kolak) has conceived a creepy stalkerish infatuation with Marzena. The bleached-out colour palette achieved by cinematographer Oleg Mutu (who shot Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days and Beyond the Hills) gives everything such a spare, stark look – in the opening dinner-table scene, the setting could almost be a digital green screen. The film’s emotional distance is indebted to directors such as Farhadi and Haneke. Its bodies look as if they have been painted by Lucian Freud. This is a vision of purgatory.
