A scorching and visually uncompromising debut film by the Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal and his partner Anka, whose shared sense of restlessness and ruin produces a dirty yet beautiful portrait of a ravaged contemporary rural Poland. Think of it as a misanthrophic, meaner and leaner version of Beasts of the Southern Wild, wherein the makeshift and haphazard fails to elevate a community and instead collapses on itself, revealing the hollowness within. All that is open and inviting is not what it seems, for it takes a village to reveal the villain. Young Pawel sells scrap for a living and is in the process of moving his ailing mother from the cramped family quarters to a rest home. It’s a move that promises a hint of change as well as a chance to be with his girlfriend, whose own home existence is filled with torpor. Somehow the act of displacing the matriarch causes the ground to shift, Pawel vanishes, and the restless, displaced rage and resentment takes hold. Few words are spoken in this ravishing film, as if to indicate that all the pretty pictures are placeholders for what lurks at the edge of the frame. — Madeleine Molyneaux