Wanja
Director: Carolina Hellsgård
Starring: Anne Ratte-Polle
87 mins

Anne Ratte-Polle stars as Wanja, a woman who has just been released on parole after a seven-year stint in prison for bank robbery.

She is assigned a flat, a probation officer, and lands an internship at a pet shop. When that doesn’t go too well, she finds a job at a local race track, where she strikes up a tentative friendship with Emma (Nele Trebs) a young woman battling various addictions.

Like In Your Arms, Wanja is a film largely concerned with its protagonists and their struggles. Here we have a woman’s attempts to build a life in society after her confinement.

The effects of her confinement are clear, and Ratte-Polle does a good job of projecting Wanja’s reclusive nature – her economy with words, her struggle to connect intimately with other people and general suspicion of all those around her speak volumes; while she fills her apartment with birds and wild ducks to keep her company.

Writer/director Carolina Hellsgård has created a solid character in her eponymous protagonist, yet in keeping her so aloof she has made it a little difficult for us to understand her.

There is one moment where Wanja cracks, but this is all too fleeting before she retreats behind her cool veneer.

Her friendship with Emma allows her to open up a tad, yet the young girl is sketched a little too thinly – we assume that Wanja sees in her a substitute for her estranged young daughter.

The depth of the friendship is never truly explored, and that Wanja chooses to compromise her parole conditions in order to help Emma doesn’t quite ring true.

While overall keeping her style rather straightforward, Hellsgård adopts some interesting flourishes – Wanja’s adopted blackbird flying desperately around a room seeking to break free very effectively mirrors her internal struggles; however the rather opaque note on which the film ends is a bit puzzling.