In Ida, Agata Trzebuchowska makes a novice’s quietness persuasive without making her easy to read. We rate the performance highly, with occasional frustration at how little of Anna’s inner life reaches us.
Fi1m perspective
In Ida (2013), Agata Trzebuchowska’s Anna meets unfamiliar facts about her family with a reserve that makes sense for a sheltered novice nun. It is a persuasive performance, particularly because her quietness does not make the young woman seem merely mysterious. Anna has to work out what to make of her aunt Wanda as well as what she learns about her parents. Trzebuchowska makes that double difficulty convincing without spelling out every feeling, and rewards the attention the film asks us to give her.
Director Paweł Pawlikowski and co-writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz give her something concrete to respond to: questions of Jewish identity and Catholic faith arise within this awkward family relationship. We were moved by Anna’s struggle to understand Wanda, because Trzebuchowska’s reserve makes the distance between them painful. The screenplay helps her avoid becoming merely an illustration of the subjects under discussion. Yet the careful framing sometimes holds us too far away, and the performance does not always overcome it. We occasionally want more of the young woman behind the quietness.
This is also a case where we should resist turning one performance into a catalogue of an actor’s habits. Trzebuchowska had no previous acting experience, and Anna remains her only substantial acting role; a cameo in Never Gonna Snow Again (2020) gives us little basis for comparison. She has not pursued acting as a career. What we can judge is how well Pawlikowski’s film uses her reserve, not how reliably another director might draw it out.
Her work has instead moved towards writing and directing, with the short Heat (2016), co-directed with Mateusz Pacewicz, followed by Vacancy (2019). Her feature directorial debut, Ties (2025), also known as Sick, is a horror-romance concerned with adolescence. Those are films to judge separately, without assuming that a convincing performance makes a convincing director. Nor should Anna’s restraint become something we expect her own characters to reproduce. For her acting, see Ida, accepting that its careful compositions sometimes keep a persuasive performance further away than we would like.
Biography
Agata Trzebuchowska is a Polish actress, screenwriter and film director. She made her screen debut in the title role of Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida (2013), playing a young novice nun. She had no prior acting experience when spotted by Małgorzata Szumowska in a Warsaw café and introduced to the director.
Trzebuchowska later appeared in a cameo as a woman at a concert in Never Gonna Snow Again (2020). She has directed and written several short films, including Heat (2016) and Vacancy (2019), and works as a journalist for the magazine Przekrój. She was born on 12 April 1992 in Poland and studied at the University of Warsaw.
