Agnieszka Smoczyńska

A nightclub lit red and blue, a woman on a stage, and something going badly wrong just out of frame. That is the Agnieszka Smoczyńska picture. It was there in The Lure (2015), a mermaid musical set in a Warsaw nightclub, and it is there again in Hot Spot (2026), where the one thing we would send you to see is a concert. She likes the lurid, she likes loud music over bad feeling, and she likes a woman who does not belong where she is standing. What varies from film to film is whether there is a story underneath to carry all that.

She began with shorts and documentaries in the mid-2000s, and The Lure, written by Robert Bolesto and drawn from her own childhood around nightclubs, was the breakthrough. Fugue (2018) was the opposite film: a controlled drama about a woman with dissociative fugue who returns to a family she does not remember, written by and starring Gabriela Muskała. There was a segment in the horror anthology The Field Guide to Evil (2018), television including 1983 and Warrior Nun, and then The Silent Twins (2022), her first film in English, about June and Jennifer Gibbons, with animation standing in for the world the two of them wrote for each other. The through-line is plain enough: a genre, a woman on the margins, and music and pictures doing the work of explaining her.

When the story holds, the stylisation serves it. The Lure was quite as odd as Hot Spot and twice as clear, because it had two sisters and never let go of them, and The Silent Twins kept the same grip even when some critics found its fantasy sequences mannered. In Hot Spot the grip is gone. Bolesto's script gives us a man called Jan 623 (Andrzej Konopka), a woman called Rana (Noomi Rapace), a woman called Ayka (Reika Kirishima), a soldier and a train, and the tagline, "The system is unstable", is as much premise as anyone gets. We sat in the red and the blue for 101 minutes admiring the lighting and growing steadily crosser that nobody would tell us why Jan had a number, and by the time the concert came round we had stopped waiting for an answer. We gave it 48, and the concert earned most of that.

She has worked with Bolesto three times and with the cinematographer Jakub Kijowski three times, and the look of her films is consistent even when the writing is not. In 2023 her advice to young filmmakers was three words: "Embrace the madness." Hot Spot does, and nobody could mistake it for anyone else's film. The next one needs what the first one had, which is somebody on screen to hold on to while the lights change colour.