Ewa Wikiel’s feature directorial debut, Krzyk: Losing Control, plays as a hallucinatory, tightly wound slide into a woman’s psychological collapse. The title signals the film’s central rupture: “krzyk” is the Polish word for “scream,” and that sound fractures the careful order of the protagonist’s life.
The story follows Lena (Gina Henkel), a bacteriologist locked into a work-driven routine until she witnesses a fiery car accident and hears a woman’s death scream. The shock hits like a siren in her mind, dragging forward the buried grief tied to the loss of her stillborn child. Working with co-writer Halina Rasinski, Wikiel shapes a visceral psychological drama that moves through a dreamlike space where memory and present tense keep bleeding together, holding to a bleak mood from start to finish.
Thematic Depth and Psychological Focus
The film takes on parental loss at birth with a severity that leaves little room for comfort. The scream on the highway becomes the trigger that snaps Lena’s stalled mourning into motion. What follows tracks a steady breakdown. Lena’s fixation on the dead woman, Nina, and the relationship she later forms with Nina’s widower, Viktor, read as outward expressions of an inner need to make sense of her own loss.
Wikiel’s approach carries weight because the grief is presented as chaotic, corrosive, and physically unpleasant. The script avoids turning Lena into a sentimental symbol. Her suffering comes through denial, bad decisions, and a tightening battle with self-control, shaping a hard-edged view of motherhood and loss.
The film stays locked to Lena’s subjectivity. Flashbacks, nightmares, and shards of memory flare up in quick bursts, building disorientation and keeping the viewer unsure if each moment belongs to shared reality or to Lena’s unstable perception.
Visual Style and Narrative Fragmentation
Krzyk establishes its visual grammar immediately, and it stays in service of the psychological angle. Cinematographer Konstantin Minnich gives the film a dark, dreamlike atmosphere that holds steady. The lighting leans into extravagant color, echoing contemporary psychological thrillers, while the imagery shifts between warped fish-eye shots and rough surveillance-style footage. The result is a mix of psychodrama, muted horror, and crime textures, with roaming camera movement that becomes especially striking in a key dance sequence.
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Hannah von Hübbenet’s music sharpens the mood through discordant strings that place the viewer inside Lena’s distress. The storytelling stays fractured, leaning on suggestion and withholding clean explanations. That method deepens the unease and aligns with traditions of parallel cinema where inner life shapes what the camera treats as real. The trade-off is that the film provides little explicit backstory or clear motivation, so the viewer has to assemble the emotional throughline from what is shown in fragments.
Performance and Cinematic Critique
The film’s pull rests heavily on Gina Henkel’s lead performance. Her Lena feels exposed and credible, giving the audience something firm to hold onto while the character slides into erratic, obsessive behavior. Henkel’s intensity sells the film’s central emotional idea and keeps it engaging even as Lena becomes harder to watch. The supporting cast, including Anton Weil as her boyfriend Jakob, offers steady support around her.
At times, the film’s technical strength pulls attention away from narrative clarity. The screenplay can feel scattered. The central trigger also creates a practical issue: the “scream” that sets everything in motion is inaudible to the audience, which weakens the force of Lena’s immediate reaction early on and strains belief at the starting line. Even with that limitation, the film’s visual force and Henkel’s committed work give Krzyk: Losing Control the weight of a demanding psychological exercise, one that stays fixed on trauma through a dark, tightly subjective viewpoint.
Krzyk: Losing Control is a German-Polish psychological thriller that premiered at film festivals in early 2024. The film, which runs for 81 minutes, marks the feature directorial debut of Ewa Wikiel. It tells the story of Lena, a bacteriologist whose life descends into obsession after she witnesses a fatal car accident. You can currently watch the film on various video-on-demand services, including iTunes and Google Play.
Full Credits
Title: Krzyk: Losing Control
Distributor: Available on platforms like iTunes, Google Play, VUDU, and Hoopla.
Release date: 2024 (Premiered at film festivals starting early 2024, such as the Max Ophüls Prize Festival in January 2024).
Running time: 81 minutes (1 hour 21 minutes)
Director: Ewa Wikiel
Writers: Ewa Wikiel, Halina Rasinski
Producers and Executive Producers: Ibrahim-Utku Erdogan (Producer), Joe Letz (Executive Producer), Andreas Louis (Executive Producer), Marcel Mate (Co-Producer), Konstantin Minnich (Co-Producer)
Cast: Gina Henkel, Anton Weil, Paweł Deląg, Wiktoria Gorodecka, Noah Szendel, Natalia Mateo, Marek Pyś, Katharina Bellena, Max von Zimmer, Pati Revera
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Konstantin Minnich
Editors: Ibrahim-Utku Erdogan, Joe Letz
The Review
Krzyk: Losing Control
Krzyk: Losing Control is a visually stunning and intensely acted psychological journey into the heart of unresolved grief. Director Ewa Wikiel’s debut is a strong stylistic achievement, offering a rare, unflinching view of self-destructive maternal trauma. While the narrative is intentionally fragmented and sometimes vague in its character motivations, Gina Henkel's powerful performance anchors the emotional chaos. The film succeeds as a mesmerizing, unsettling dive into a subjective reality.
PROS
- Gina Henkel provides a raw, compelling portrayal of Lena’s psychological descent.
- Excellent cinematography (Konstantin Minnich) with expressive lighting and dreamlike aesthetics.
- Offers a sophisticated, non-sentimental look at the self-destructive nature of repressed maternal grief.
- Successfully blurs the line between reality and memory using music and imagery to create a visceral, subjective tone.
CONS
- The fragmented storytelling leaves character motivations and certain plot developments vaguely explained.
- The central "scream" catalyst, though thematic, is not audibly clear, slightly weakening the protagonist's immediate breakdown.
- Lack of detailed background for supporting characters makes connection difficult.
