Marking Skolimowski’s return to filmmaking, Four Nights with Anna was inspired by a newspaper story that the director fashioned into one of his strange and disturbingly ambiguous tales of obsessive love. There are echoes of fellow Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film about Love, but Skolimowski’s take on l’amour fou is much tougher and devoid of any attempt at spiritual uplift.
His chief protagonist, Leon (Artur Steranko), is a dour middle-aged loner who works in the crematorium at a local hospital and spies on a nurse living close to his home.
An early sequence in which Leon purchases an axe might suggest some kind of bloodbath is on the cards, but this is just one of numerous red herrings Skolimowski inserts into another of his elliptical narratives in which the lives of his damaged characters are explored but never fully explained. The sense of pain and guilt that the two protagonists share is punctuated with much dark humour.