Sick Lands First: Trzebuchowska Took the Camera Back

Agata Trzebuchowska was twenty-two years old when Paweł Pawlikowski put her in *Ida* and the world learned what a face could do without a single line of dialogue. She played a novice nun discovering she was Jewish in postwar Poland, and she did it with a stillness so complete it felt like a provocation. The film won the Oscar for Best International Feature. Trzebuchowska won nothing, because that's how that works — the debut performance that makes a director famous tends to disappear into the director's legacy. She has spent the years since doing the only logical thing: learning to hold the camera herself.

*Sick* is her directorial debut, and the trailer suggests she absorbed everything Pawlikowski taught her and then pointed it somewhere he would never go. Coming-of-age horror, which is either the most redundant genre description ever written or the most honest one, depending on how you feel about adolescence. The imagery is disturbing in the specific way that matters — not gore, not jump cuts, but something quieter and harder to name, the particular dread of watching a young woman become something she didn't choose. The architecture underneath the horror is already visible from thirty seconds of footage, and that's the sign.

Naomi Watts was at the San Sebastián Film Festival this week receiving the Donostia Award and saying what we all know but rarely hear said this cleanly: the industry is finally, slowly, acknowledging that women over fifty exist. She pointed to the Emmys as evidence. It is heartening. It is also forty years late, but you take the progress in the order it arrives.

Phil Lord and Chris Miller — who made *Project Hail Mary* after spending years making *Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse* look effortless — are keynoting IndieWire's Future of Filmmaking Summit next month. They are the most interesting conversation about animation, adaptation, and blockbuster craft happening right now, and the Russo brothers, who are currently directing *Avengers: Doomsday* while their quietly excellent *Deadly Class* Syfy adaptation collects dust in the algorithm, are the proof that even brilliant commercial instincts don't guarantee the culture keeps up.

The verdict this week belongs to Trzebuchowska. She was someone's discovery. Now she's doing the discovering.