Returning to directing after a seventeen year hiatus devoted to painting, Skolimowski won instant and near unanimous praise for his deliberately and provocatively “minor” film – a dream-like meditation on guilt and frustrated desire focused on a lonely mortician’s assistant. Skolimowski returned to his earliest filmmaking roots by setting his story in small town Poland and allowing the film, co-written with Ewa Piaskowska, to follow an oneiric logic and to challenge viewers with its delicate, almost uneasy, balance between pathos and comedy. Stylistically rich and accomplished, Four Nights With Anna conjures a dank shadow world that is Kafkaesque in the best sense, a world of numbing bureaucracy that animates secret, furtive desires in those trapped within its cold and elusive labyrinths. – HG