A single frame can contain the absence of God, or perhaps His crushing, silent presence. The entire cinema of Paweł Pawlikowski seems devoted to exploring this vertiginous ambiguity, and nowhere does he do so with the same dazzling, ascetic perfection as in Ida. Shot in a black and white that evokes not nostalgia but rather a stripping away of memory, and framed in an almost-square 4:3 aspect ratio that seems to imprison its characters, the film is a work of almost Bressonian rigor, a road movie of the soul that traverses the unhealed scars of Polish history.

Pawlikowski's visual grammar, crafted with cinematographers Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski, is his first, disquieting statement of intent. The characters are almost always relegated to the lower third of the screen, towered over by an oppressive emptiness: grey skies, bare ceilings, peeling walls. This negative space, this exaggerated headroom, is no stylistic affectation; it is the film's invisible protagonist. It is the weight of history, the silence of God after Auschwitz, the burden of an unspoken past that looms over every moment. As in the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi, where desolate interiors and figures with their backs turned suggest impenetrable inner worlds, so the compositions in Ida compel us to contemplate not what is shown, but what is deliberately omitted, what presses in from above and from the sides.

The story, in its essence, has the gait of a parable or a medieval morality tale catapulted into the abyss of the 20th century. Anna, a young novice raised in a convent in 1962 Poland, is about to take her final vows. The Mother Superior, however, urges her to meet the only living relative she has left: an aunt named Wanda. The meeting is a collision of universes. On one side, the almost unearthly purity of Anna (an extraordinary Agata Trzebuchowska, whose face is a canvas onto which every repressed emotion is projected); on the other, the alcoholic, sensual disillusionment of Wanda (an unforgettable Agata Kulesza), a former Stalinist prosecutor known as "Red Wanda," now a cynical judge drowning the memory of her triumphs and compromises in smoke and vodka.

It is Wanda who drops the bomb that shatters Anna’s sheltered world: her real name is Ida Lebenstein, she is Jewish, and her parents were killed during the Nazi occupation. Thus begins their journey, a secular pilgrimage in search of the bones of their loved ones, buried in a forest somewhere in the Polish countryside. This journey is not just an investigation into a family past, but a philosophical and spiritual duel between two worldviews, two ways of surviving trauma. Ida represents the escape into faith, an attempt to transcend the horror of history through a higher order. Wanda embodies total immersion in history, the nihilistic acceptance that there is no order, only chaos, power, and oblivion. Their dialogue is a constant counterpoint between the sacred and the profane, between contemplative silence and the noise of the world.

Pawlikowski grants no quarter to either path. Ida's faith is not presented as an easy solution, but as an iron discipline, an almost inhuman choice in the face of manifest human cruelty. Wanda’s cynicism, on the other hand, is not simple defeatism, but the logical consequence for one who has seen too much, who actively participated in building a failed utopia (communism) on the ashes of a genocide. In this, their dynamic recalls certain Dostoevskian characters, like the devout Alyosha and the skeptical Ivan Karamazov, locked in an eternal debate on the existence of evil and the possibility of grace. But here the debate is not abstract; it is etched into the earth, into the mud, into the bones that are finally unearthed.

The film handles its historical context with an elliptical mastery that is its greatest strength. The Holocaust and the subsequent crimes of the communist regime are not shown in didactic flashbacks, but linger like ghosts. They are present in the farmer who occupies the Lebensteins’ house, in his gaze that mixes guilt and fear, in the halting confession that reveals an unspeakable truth: it wasn't the Germans who killed Ida's family, but their Polish neighbors, out of greed and antisemitism. Pawlikowski, with courage and without universal accusatory intent, touches the raw nerve of local complicity, a long-taboo subject. But his is not an act of indictment, but rather an observation of the inextricable tangle of victimhood and culpability that constitutes a nation's collective memory. Wanda herself, who condemned "enemies of the state" to death, is she not part of another chain of violence? The film offers no answers, but asks terrible questions about the nature of justice and forgiveness in a world that seems to have banished them.

Into this universe of moral and visual greys, an element of rupture erupts: music. Not an extradiegetic score, but the music the characters themselves hear. From Bach's "Largo" echoing in a church, we shift to the feverish jazz of John Coltrane, played by a young saxophonist (Dawid Ogrodnik) in a Łódź club. "Naima," "Equinox": these are not random selections. They represent the seduction of the world, of sensuality, of the profane life. For Ida, this encounter is a temptation, a crack in her monolithic world. For one brief, dazzling interlude, Ida experiences the alternative. She puts on her aunt’s heels and dress, lets down her hair, drinks, dances, and spends a night with the musician. It is her what if, her moment of potential escape.

But the film's catharsis is twofold and tragically divergent. Wanda, having completed her task, having given burial to her son's remains and seen her niece confront her own identity, chooses that she can no longer bear the weight of memory. Her suicide, cold and methodical, is the final act of one who has exhausted all illusion. It is a chilling sequence, shot with the same impassive distance with which the camera has observed everything else. Ida, by contrast, after tasting the world, makes the opposite choice. Her return to the convent is no longer the decision of an innocent, unknowing soul, but a conscious, considered choice. The splendid final shot shows her walking down a country road, this time occupying the center of the frame, her stride resolute. We do not know if her faith is stronger, or if it is simply the only raft to cling to in the shipwreck of history. But now, the choice is hers.

Ida is a work that operates by subtraction, a masterpiece distilled to its very essence. It refuses all easy psychologizing, all verbose explanation, all conventional emotional catharsis. As in a Flannery O'Connor story, grace is a terrible, almost violent event that bursts into an imperfect world. With a running time of just 82 minutes, the film has the density of a novel and the iconic power of a series of sacral photographs. It is a work that reminds us how great cinema does not need to shout to shake the foundations of our consciousness. Sometimes, all it takes is silence, a rigorous frame, and the face of a woman walking toward a destiny she has, at last, chosen for herself.