QHER WILL BE DONE

QHER WILL BE DONE

A Film by Julia Kowalski

By Serge Leterrier

Peasant Witchcraft: Kowalski's Radical Gambit

From the opening frames of Her Will Be Done, this familiar blend of mud and peasant Catholicism seemed destined to join the crowded ranks of French rural chronicles sprinkled with genre elements. Here's where the misunderstanding begins. The Franco-Polish director plays with our expectations to better subvert them, transforming what could have been another portrait of rural France into a genuine plunge into thwarted female desire.

Maria Wróbel I Copyright New Story

Nawojka inhabits this family farm where her father and brothers reign, an immutable patriarchal architecture rendering her barely visible. Maria Wróbel, already noticed in Kowalski's I Saw the Devil's Face, possesses that rare capacity to embody psychic tension with her entire body. Her convulsions tell more than dialogue about this woman crushed by a troubled maternal legacy—a mother dead in murky circumstances, between flames and supposed curse. The actress summons the radical intensity of Żuławski's cinema, that Polish way of filming neurosis on the brink of mystical explosion.

The film could have sunk under expositional weight, accumulating rural symbols and Catholic traditions to suffocation. Julia Kowalski knows this. She dynamites her own device with Sandra's appearance, this magnetic figure played by Roxane Mesquida. The actress carries a transgressive heritage from Catherine Breillat and Gregg Araki films, that particular way of making desire a political gesture. Her emergence transforms the mise-en-scène: a slow zoom behind a cracked barn gate electrifies the atmosphere. Mesquida embodies that sulfurous freedom the village rejects, this woman returned to reveal patriarchal violence.

The wedding sequence constitutes the narrative pivot. Kowalski deploys virtuosity where village celebration tips toward unease as night falls. Sandra arrives, intrusive, magnetic, shattering artificial harmony. The father's impeded speech, that suspended moment of authentic emotion, contrasts violently with what follows.

Then comes nocturnal flight. Two women, two men, a car launched into darkness. Hypnotic electric guitar transforms narrative into cathartic odyssey, releasing all compressed energy. Kowalski abandons realistic drama to embrace the fantastic. Forest, mud, fire—filmed in 16mm by Simon Beaufils—compose an organic visual palette where celluloid grain becomes living matter. This technical choice creates that troubling sensation of witnessing a 1970s film while anchored in 2025's preoccupations.

The director inscribes herself within a rebellious French cinema lineage—Philippe Grandrieux, Patricia Mazuy's Peaux de vaches—where real violence contaminates the fantastic, where bodies become projection surfaces for exceeding forces. Kowalski refuses conventional psychology for actor direction assuming artificiality, that strange theatricality making certain shots silent portraits. This evokes Jacques Tourneur's capacity to film stupefaction facing the unrepresentable, faces suspended between terror and fascination.

Nawojka's return—naked, covered in ashes and earth—crystallizes the film's ambiguity. Is she possessed, witch, mad, or simply a woman whose erotic impulses manifest as supernatural power? Kowalski deliberately leaves questions open, refusing univocal explanations. This ambiguity disturbs, even frustrates spectators wanting clarity. Yet this indetermination constitutes the device's strength. Female desire becomes telluric energy destroying everything, an incandescent metaphor for impossible emancipation in a man's world.

Beaufils's photography merits attention. The 16mm gives the film grainy texture, tactile materiality where colorimetric variations narrate as much as dialogue. The farm's brown tones contrast with reds and golds of the fantastic night. Each shot seems inhabited by truth buried between celluloid grains, the format itself carrying horror cinema memory.

Maria Wróbel carries the film with impressive physical determination. Her body becomes battlefield between tradition and emancipation, submission and revolt. She gives Nawojka that tragic dimension of heroines discovering power at the moment it threatens destruction. Opposite her, Mesquida embodies libertarian temptation, that possibility of another life rendering current existence intolerable.

The film possesses flaws. Its first half hesitates, multiplies expositional scenes weighing down narrative. Yet I perceive calculated restraint, remaining at the edge to better suggest the abyss. Her Will Be Done challenges through refusing narrative facilities. Kowalski could have made classic demonic possession with rituals and certainties. She chooses troubling ambiguity, that gray zone where madness, possession, and sexual awakening blur.

Julia Kowalski confirms with this second feature a singular voice in French cinema. She draws from Polish roots this capacity blending Catholic mysticism and transgressive eroticism, that cinematographic tradition where body becomes confrontation site between divine and profane forces. The film merits patient approach, accepting initial wanderings to appreciate its incandescent second half.

I leave this film haunted by images of fire and mud, by this radical vision of emancipation through the old world's destruction. Kowalski's cinema disturbs as much as fascinates—exactly what one expects from work refusing compromise.

"Kowalski poses an incendiary question: must we destroy everything to finally exist?"