THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH. Kulig and Hawke Together on Screen

American writer Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke) flies to Paris to be closer to his six-year-old daughter, but the girl’s mother clearly doesn’t want her ex-husband around and quickly calls the police. While fleeing, Tom gets on a bus, where he is robbed, and from there he heads to a seedy café with an equally shabby little hotel upstairs. The friendly, though somewhat suspicious, owner lets him take one of the rooms, keeping the American’s passport as collateral. Soon, he also finds Tom a job – locked in a room with a monitor showing people trying to enter the building, Tom is to open the door only for guests of a certain Mr. Monde. However, he is not allowed to leave the room until his shift is over.

Even from this outline alone, there’s potential for an intriguing thriller, but director Paweł Pawlikowski is not interested in the genre’s typical devices, and the clues he drops for viewers turn out to have no relevance to the plot—because, in fact, there is hardly any plot at all.

So what do we have instead? For one thing, the women Tom meets. Working at the café is Ania (Joanna Kulig), a young and cheerful blonde from Poland, full of warmth and kindness. And then there’s the titular woman from the Fifth District, Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) – statuesque, seemingly inaccessible, yet quick to start an affair with Tom. Together, they shape a new routine for the protagonist: at night, he works at his mysterious job, he meets Margit every day after 4 p.m., and in between, he grows closer to Ania. He doesn’t forget about his daughter, to whom he writes long, illustrated letters.

This everyday order is thrown into chaos when a dead body appears in the hotel.

Or maybe the disruption comes earlier? In the very first scenes, we’re told that Hawke’s character is “ill” and has spent some time in a hospital. We can only guess what kind. His profession may also serve to mislead the audience—after all, writers (especially novelists) often escape into fiction. But Pawlikowski deliberately avoids using any devices that would undermine realism. In this, he’s somewhat like Martin Scorsese in Shutter Island, where the line between truth and illusion was also left undefined—except there, everything was exaggerated and deliberately surreal. In The Woman in the Fifth, it’s the opposite: everything is as real as possible, making it almost impossible to separate what’s real from what’s imagined.

There is also the invented forest Tom describes in his letters to his daughter. This forest appears repeatedly, like a leitmotif: a worm slowly climbing a tree, an owl watching intently, a little girl in a red jacket wandering around. Yet even here, Pawlikowski finds a justification for these images, and this single stylistic element that seems to belong to the protagonist’s imagination takes on concrete form in the finale. That doesn’t mean everything is true—only that the question remains: how can we tell?

The Woman in the Fifth is not a crime thriller but a work of psychological cinema. What matters is not the resolution or suspense from typical genre devices, but the protagonist’s situation and his behavior.

Hawke is excellent as the tormented writer in a foreign country, seeking support from two very different women. Is Ania the light and Margit the darkness? That may be an oversimplification, but it’s hard to see them otherwise. Pawlikowski’s previous film, My Summer of Love, was also built on contrasts between female characters—practically identical ones (poor–rich, genuine–false, countryside–city). But in that film, the interesting element was how the women reacted to each other. In The Woman…, Ania and Margit never meet—a pity, as it might have created some genuine emotion. Instead, we get a cold drama about a man who must decide which force within him will prevail, and which direction he will be drawn toward. That’s not a small theme, but I prefer films that explore it in a livelier, more engaging way—without the pretentious edge.