Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) spins a new viewpoint to a familiar story, the Holocaust. This film just covers three lives, a mother, a father and a son who were murdered for their farm in Poland during WWII. It is now roughly 20 years later when the daughter of the deceased is about to take her vows as a nun after growing up in the convent as an orphan. Ida (known as Anna by the nuns), finds out she has a living aunt she must meet before taking her vows.

From her aunt she finds out that she is Jewish, she was given up to the convent because she could pass for a gentile, and might survive. That would be my one gripe with the film, I wasn’t able to figure out how her aunt survived, or why her parents and brother were murdered by the farmer now living on their farm. It may have been explained or is obvious to any Pole, but it sure wasn’t to me.

Bill Goodykoontz in USA Today gave Ida 4 1/2 stars, I arrived at the same rank by giving the storyline 3 stars and the cinematography 5. I hadn’t seen a movie so beautifully shot since The Great Beauty (Italy 2013). Except for a few frames the movie was shot in a square format. That combined with the black and white made for a stunning presentation. After all the widescreen for the past 60 years it was a very artistic change.

There were some intriguing points to contemplate in the film. Aunt Wanda was put-off by the idea of Ida becoming a nun. Wanda also seemed to have quite a bit of knowledge  of Christianity. Keeping in mind that the film is set in the Poland in the early sixties, the Soviet Union seems to get a pass for the oppression it grips it’s satellite country with. Plus, you have the age old question, was Wanda an alcoholic because she was a basket case, or vice versa? Did she come to her untimely demise because she had no spiritual anchor, or was it unavoidable considering her circumstances?

Ida (Anna) had the more hopeful story. Though her life was put through this really intense tempest (finding out the fate of her parents and her own heritage while being bombarded by the sensual stimulation of a world she’s never known), she seemed to be able to survive and thrive due to her spiritual foundation. It seemed appropriate when Ida delays taking her vows, and instead experiences the ways of the world. After her exposure to life’s temptations, when she returns to the nunnery it seems to be with no regrets, now that she knows what the world offers is empty promises. You do wonder why she doesn’t try to evangelize her obviously troubled aunt.

In one of the grittiest scenes since Winter’s Bone when Jennifer Lawrence has to remove the hands from her dead father to prove he is dead to the court, Ida, Wanda and the murderer farmer dig up the bones of her parents and brother, place them in a burlap bag and take them to be simply reburied in a family burial plot. The sound of the bones clinking in the bag as she puts them in the trunk of the car struck me as impossibly raw. It really brings home the whole death, murder and mortality thing.

Director Pawel Pawlikowski did such an unpretentious yet beautiful job with this film, it will be interesting to see what the Polish director does with the upcoming Georgian/Russian-language film Kamo about the early career of Joseph Stalin. People from the former Soviet-bloc usually have a much better grasp of what a demon Stalin was, then we do.

“Most films today substitute sex and violence for virtue, and compensate for lack of substance and message with excessive sound.”