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‘Her Will Be Done’ Review: Superstition Meets Smalltown Bigotry in a Grimily Atmospheric Psychodrama
Bad vibes abound in Julia Kowalski's "Her Will Be Done" which adds a dose of folk horror to a scathing portrait of rural French parochialism.
The opening moments cement its tonal dissonance as, with a twang of Daniel Kowalski’s spare, uneasy score, a brief prologue with fire, a flailing figure and mutterings about Satan snaps to a far more banal view of an empty street lined with dim, shuttered houses under a low, gray sky. This is the dreary French town, shot as though through grubby lenses by DP Simon Beaufils (“Anatomy of a Fall”), nearby which Polish farmer Henryck (Wojciech Skibinski) lives on a smallholding with his sons Tomek (Przemyslaw Przestrzeiski) and Bogdan (Kuba Dyniewicz) and his daughter Nawojka (Maria Wróbel), usually just called Naw. Naw is a mousy, near-mute little thing, perpetually bullied by her beefy, boorish brothers and regarded with suspicion by her father, who is gruffly affectionate towards her but also worries she has inherited her dead mother’s “evil.” The cost of integrating from the Old Country into this small, unwelcoming community has been high, we infer, and Henryck cannot afford to have anything add to their outsider status.
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