‘Agata the Writer’ Venice Review: Mia Wasikowska Leads a Bold Inquiry Into Art and Responsibility
While researching a novel in Sarajevo, an Australian writer discovers that understanding a city’s past means questioning her own right to tell it. In Venice Days.
Australian actress of Polish descent Mia Wasikowska has built an enviable career, working—more often than not—with some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers. Whether the films themselves were major successes or more modest achievements, she has appeared in works by Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg, Tim Burton, Gus Van Sant, Guillermo del Toro, Park Chan-wook, and Cary Fukunaga, among many others. In recent years, while stepping away somewhat from the spotlight, Wasikowska has gravitated toward auteur-driven projects that circulate primarily through the festival circuit, collaborating with directors such as Mia Hansen-Løve, Jessica Hausner, and Antonio Campos.
Agata the Writer continues that trajectory. It’s a deliberately austere film, one whose narrative choices and visual approach are remarkably uncompromising—especially for a movie led by an actor as recognizable as Wasikowska. Directed by Polish-Australian visual artist Kuba Dorabialski, it follows an Australian writer who travels to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in search of inspiration for her next novel. In some ways, Wasikowska’s career increasingly resembles that of actors like Tilda Swinton, effortlessly moving between relatively accessible arthouse cinema and far more experimental work.
Right from the opening scenes, it’s clear that this film leans much further toward the experimental than anything Wasikowska has done before. The extended takes, the long silences, and the pervasive stillness all point to a filmmaker pursuing a highly specific tone and formal language. Gradually, a narrative begins to emerge. Agata is an Australian novelist of Polish descent, best known for writing comic fiction. But her trip to Sarajevo revolves around a very different project: she wants to write a novel set there during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.
The film follows Agata through a series of encounters with local residents—war survivors, a playwright, a young girl she meets in a nearby village, tour guides, and others—most of them part of the research for her book. Almost everyone she interviews tries to dissuade her from the project. Why write yet another novel about wartime Sarajevo? Haven’t enough of those already been written? And beneath that lies the film’s most uncomfortable question: why should she, someone with no direct connection to the city or its history, be the one telling this story?
Alongside these often uneasy conversations, Dorabialski observes Agata’s daily life in Sarajevo. She reconnects with Davina (Mia Morrissey), a warm, engaging friend who accompanies her around the city, while also dealing with a series of peculiar thefts at the house where she’s staying. The disappearances—paintings, pottery, and other carefully selected objects—create an atmosphere that is equal parts unsettling and mysterious. Throughout it all, Agata continues trying to determine what kind of novel she’s writing and what role, if any, she has in the history of the city and the lives of the people she’s meeting.
Drawing on an evident background in video art and installation work—visible both in the film’s visual composition and in its narrative strategies—Dorabialski crafts an elegant and intellectually rich meditation on the work of a writer, one that could just as easily apply to filmmaking itself. At every turn, the film interrogates both its own methods and the story it’s attempting to tell. Is it legitimate to make art in a country that isn’t yours, about experiences that have nothing to do with your own life? Isn’t there an element of exploiting historical trauma for artistic gain? Judging from Agata’s interviews, the answer often seems to be yes. And yet the film also suggests there may still be a responsible way of telling a story rooted in that place. Agata the Writer becomes an attempt to discover what that might look like.
At a certain point—in what a more conventionally structured drama would call the third act, although those categories hardly matter here—Dorabialski makes a bold narrative move that, for me, feels somewhat oblique and perhaps a little overdetermined, forcing viewers to radically reassess everything they’ve seen up to that point. It’s best left unrevealed, but it’s undeniably a divisive, even radical, choice. As abrupt as it is, and despite the way it resets the audience’s expectations, the decision ultimately follows the film’s internal logic, both narratively and formally. It’s another way of telling a story about Sarajevo—and perhaps about war itself—while sidestepping cliché, convention, and the temptation to exploit suffering. By the end, the novel Agata is trying to write and the film we’re watching become, in effect, one and the same.
