Not many films can lay claim to their opening scenes showing a woman in a raincoat and stilettos, crawling through the mud, then staggering onto a squalid train station platform before proceeding to squat down and take a pee, but Fugue sure can. That’s only the beginning, but as beginnings designed to grip the viewer’s attention, it does its job.

Alicja had another life. Another name. A husband and son. A job. All of this unknown to her for the past two years; until she’s hauled in for assaulting a police officer (for the peeing incident, one presumes). Her choice? To go to prison, or on a tv show as something of a novelty, in the hope someone will recognise her and call the hotline. It seems her luck is in, when someone claiming to be her father does just that. Further to some formalities, Alicja (soon revealed to be Kinga (Gabriela Muskala) is inserted roughly back into her old life where she’s expected to just get on with things as if she was never away.

Far from having the aforementioned over-simplified, sterile feel I usually find so unappealing among subtitled productions, nothing is sacrificed here. The dialogue being minimal isn’t the reason why either. With or without subtitles, nothing is lost in translation. It’s a quiet film that manages to scream out the emotions within using very few words; in fact, this is its main strength.

The cast of Fugue play their parts to perfection; Lukasz Simlat as husband Krzysztof has clearly been through two years of bewilderment and hurt, not to mention the strain of being suddenly left to care for the pair’s very young son, and things don’t just fall back neatly into place upon Kinga’s return. There’s resentment, anger, unasked and unanswered questions on both sides, complicated by the presence of Ewa (Malgorzata Buczkowska); Kinga’s best friend since childhood, and apparently also a work colleague. What may at first have been a necessary arrangement to help Krzysztof cope with being abruptly abandoned has without doubt led to a more complex relationship between the two; the child even referring to her as ‘mummy’ whilst shying away from Kinga, whom he likely barely remembers.

Not only is it clear that Kinga is now a completely different person who remembers nothing about her old life, she’s acutely and sharply aware that there’s far more behind the whole situation than she’s being told about. What triggered her fugue state? And what was going on in her life before that?

Fugue is a movie that turns fully on an emotive axis, the individual circumstances and sufferings of each character as they attempt to adapt and rebuild their lives are painful to witness, and not something director Agnieszka Smoczyńska lets up on for a second. It’s not high-powered tensile stuff, but an earnest representation of the complex creatures humans are, and the emotions which not only guide, but often enslave us.