Rent I Never Cry (2020)

Absorbing Polish-Irish drama - I Never Cry review by PD

This absorbing Polish-Irish release is a showcase for Zofia Stafiej, a terrific young actor with a nuanced grasp of the complex protagonist Ola. The director succeeds in the difficult task of portraying a badly behaved young woman sympathetically - she may be a royal pain in the behind throughout, but she is also caring, smart and amazingly strong and uninterested in compromise - you mess with her at your peril. And whilst it's not the first time in fiction that a character has visited a foreign country to deal with a relative's death and learned queasy truths about that person's remote life, the personal element here is mixed with a a distinctly political undertow, namely, the gulf which still exists between the eastern and western ends of the EU, and especially the unkindness of the labour market and our wider responsibilities in society. Impressive stuff.