“An idiosyncratic triumph.”

“Our genocide is old news for the West.”

When speaking about trauma, should exploring it be reserved only for people who have experienced it? How do artists deal with the responsibility of doing justice to other people’s trauma? These questions are the primary concerns in Kuba Dorabialski’s Agata the Writer, a cerebral film about the siege of Sarajevo. The story takes a turn in its final act, a swing so wild it is sure to turn some audiences off, but which allows Dorabialski’s lead actress Mia Wasikowska to soar and the director/writer to wrap everything together brilliantly. Add in mysteriously disappearing art and a bit of scatology, and you have an odd duck of a film that is a cleverly written examination of the difficult relationship between art and historical trauma.

When her editor offers Agata (Wasikowska), a Polish writer now living in Australia, the opportunity to housesit a friend’s Sarajevo apartment she jumps at the chance. She intends to write a war novel set in the Bosnian capital, but when interviewing locals who actually went through the city’s four-year siege in the mid-90s, her motives are questioned. Why does she want to tell this story? Increasingly Agata feels like she is exploiting the war as a literary device. The pain is clearly still there; everybody she speaks to has lost a relative or two. They feel forgotten and undervalued by the West, including Agata’s liaison, theater director Jasmina (Vedrana Božinović), even though she spent the brunt of the war in Vienna. When Agata’s friend Davina (Mia Morrissey) comes over for a few days, strange things start to happen: first a painting of a woman relieving herself disappears from the apartment, then a vase in the shape of a turd. Agata starts to feel uncomfortable, and decides to move to a hotel for Davina’s last night in the city.

It is here that the film takes a bold turn: in a 20-minute monologue Wasikowska tells the story that Agata has written straight into the camera. What initially was intended to be a tale about a father and daughter hiding in the woods during the war, has now turned into the story of Janek, a sound recordist and widower, and his daughter Gabriella. They live in Paris, where Janek is working on a film, but he originally hails from Bosnia; it is pretty evident his wife died during the war. Later he and Gabriella travel to Switzerland to visit his mother-in-law, and an incident with the family dog killing a rabbit is a clear reference to the way Western countries treat the Bosnian genocide: as an anecdote, quickly forgotten.

The way Dorabialski weaves in elements from earlier in the film, from the sound recordist we see capturing the mountain winds in the film’s opening to the (fictional) Polish artist that created the painting of the defecating woman, is a masterstroke, and inventively shows the process of a novelist creating a rich narrative tapestry. By not setting the story she ultimately chooses to tell in Sarajevo, Agata respects the plea of the people she encountered to not speak for them, and leave the stories and memories of the war to those who lived them. Dorabialski intersperses Wasikowska’s monologue with shots of the surroundings where those scenes she narrates are set, but leaves out any actors portraying the characters; when Janek and Gabriella sit on a park bench in Agata’s story, the bench is empty in the visual. It is a poignant way to convey the emptiness that victims of war leave behind in the world.

With a playful mise-en-scène and a dollop of awkward humor (a conversation with an old man who survived becomes uncomfortable quickly when his predilection for scat porn surfaces), Agata the Writer comes off more lighthearted than its themes and questions suggest. Dorabialski also makes some unusual choices, like giving Jasmina a scene of her own that is unrelated to the main narrative thread save for a nod to the way the Balkans see Westerners. The fourth wall-breaking final act is the pièce de resistance, and here he shows that same playful nature: the sparse score (written by Dorabialski himself), driven by the punctuations of an upright bass, follows the cadence and the rising and falling pitch of Wasikowksa’s voice, creating an odd effect that aurally underlines her words. It is mesmerizing and hypnotic, an artistic touch that adds dynamic propulsion to what would otherwise have been a static monologue.

Some of the elements don’t quite work: the mystery of the disappearing artwork is never solved, and the fecal streak running through the film is oddly amusing but ultimately doesn’t lead to a punchline. These are minor criticisms though, even if the style of the film may turn some away while others may label the closing act an audiobook. A shortsighted critique, for sure, as it is here that Dorabialski’s writing reaches its crescendo and Wasikowska, customarily understated in the first hour of the film, proves that she can be an entrancing actress even when she is essentially reading a script. This is the kind of film that you can’t get out of your head even when not much seems to happen, and it is moments like this (if a ‘moment’ can be 20 minutes long) that make it memorable. A singular film that attempts to answer the question, who can take the ownership of trauma, Agata the Writer is an idiosyncratic triumph.