Directed by Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik
Written by Olga Tokarczuk and Agnieszka Holland
Starring Agnieszka Mandat, Wiktor Zborowski and Jakub Gierszal
Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes
Not Rated

by Hunter Bush, Associate Editor, Podcasts

I'm an animal lover, born and bred. My family always had a few pets growing up: a Siamese cat, an English bulldog, some run-of-the-mill Philadelphia street cats and a few hamsters over the years. I was a vegetarian for a little while in college until a stomach flu nearly killed me and a hamburger brought me back from the brink (true story). Watching Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik's Spoor is the closest I've come to maybe swearing off meat since that time.

Based on the novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and titled Pokot in its native Polish–Pokot being the name of the ceremony closing out a major hunt wherein a Hunt King is chosen–Spoor is a character piece wrapped in the trappings of a thriller. We spend most of the film with Ms. Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat), a woman living alone with her two dogs Lea and Bialka on the edge of the woods a little ways outside of a town somewhere in Poland. She greets every day by walking through fields, arms raised in a "v" and basking in the sunlight. She just loves nature, and animals, and isn't very fond of the town's large assortment of hunters and poachers.

At the film’s start, she seems to understand that there isn't much she can do other than take note of when one of the local huntsmen crosses some legal line or another–hunting animals out of season or poaching for instance–and file a police report that she knows will go unheeded. When the town hunting club contains both the mayor and the chief of police, you can't expect anything like swift justice. At least not from mankind.

When the film opened with narration from Duszejko about astrology; star signs and how the celestial arrangement at your birth can reveal clues about your death, I had a feeling the picture might be leaning in a supernatural direction. Once some of the locals–poachers, huntsmen, furriers–start turning up dead with unusual animal tracks around them, Duszejko begins to theorize that this is the work of nature itself, the animals getting revenge on man for a history of heartless criminal behavior.

For the greater part of the Spoor, I wanted her to be right. I was really enjoying myself for the vast majority of this flick, watching brutal men get their comeuppance, not caring whether it was actually nature's doing or the product of some human agent of spiritual and moral justice. In the final act, when Holland and Adamik perform their due diligence and unravel the whodunnit aspect of the story, it briefly lost the rhythm and tone I had been vibing on and almost starts to mimic the heist movie formula where Duszejko and everyone in her orbit–a ragtag group of folks who share an affection for her good hearted idealism–utilize their assorted skills to get her out from under the eye of scrutiny in relation to the deaths. Though it felt perfunctory, like something needed just so that the story could end, it didn't diminish my appreciation of the film any and it leads to a finale that is lyrical, sweet and beautiful.

I initially opted to review Spoor because of its poster. "If all else fails" I thought, "at least I can make fun of this janky poster". Oddly though, my enjoyment of the picture has increased my affection for the poster's rough edges.

Sure, it inadvertently gives the wolf a squinty, incredulous / possibly drunk look that's inherently kind of silly, but the intent is clear: to blur the line between predatory and prey; between who is hunting and who is being hunted. This image combined with something from the synopsis lead me to guess that this would be some sort of "perhaps there is a werewolf about" type of flick, and while that is not really the case, Duszejko slowly comes to be a kind of avatar for mother nature and an advocate of the animals. For instance, there is a scene late in the film when Duszejko reveals that she keeps some bones and scraps of fur from animals she finds slain by man's hands, in the hopes that some future technology will allow them to be cloned back to life as a form of atonement. It may sound like the ranting of an unhinged woman, the Polish archetypal counterpoint to the "crazy cat lady" cliché, but imagine if it was some dude in a black turtleneck calmly supposing it at a TED Talk? Beyond that, animal cloning has happened and with much less righteous aims.

I can't wait for my mom to be able to see Spoor when it hits VOD on January 22nd. My mother, who once bought a leopard fur coat at a yard sale so she could bury it in our front lawn, will probably find Duszejko's passion for a life in harmony with nature very relatable and I love that for her! The fact that there's gorgeous nature photography (cinematography by Jolanta Dylewska and Rafal Paradowski) throughout won't hurt, though there is some brief hunting footage that's a bit hard to take. The score (by Antoni Lazarkiewicz) is tremendous; the kind of thing I'd like to own on vinyl, almost as much as the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack and that's saying something.

Once I settled onto Spoor's wavelength, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with its characters. Maybe being constantly hyper-aware of how close I am to any other people on every occasion in which I leave my home has me feeling smothered, or maybe I just miss being able to spontaneously take a walk to enjoy the sun, but whatever the reason, I found Spoor very engrossing and very satisfying.

Spoor hits VOD on January 22nd.