Simona Kossak review – smartly sharp biopic of pioneering Polish ecologist

‘You lack both beauty and talent. Your intellect is annoying. The only thing you have is your name.” That’s the skinny, delivered by her own mother, on future Polish ecologist hero Simona Kossak, who died in 2007. The pigtailed pioneer is an unlikely subject for a pithy and unexpectedly appealing biopic, carried by a charismatic performance from Sandra Drzymalska (previously seen in Jerzy Skolimowski’s donkey odyssey EO). It even manages to make studying the foraging habits of the European roe deer seem vaguely rock’n’roll.

Having several generations of famous painters and writers behind her, the Kossak name is a heavy load for Simona to carry. But with the family living on the bohemian fringes of communist Poland, she rejects all that to conduct zoological studies in the Białowieża forest. Assigned to research roe deer while living in a remote lodge, she initially believes she has an ally in her supervisor Batura (Borys Szyc). But this primeval ecosystem is under threat from loggers, so she finds herself under pressure to falsify that the animals are eating the new pine saplings used during replantation – thus justifying a nationwide cull.

Try pitching that to Netflix as your main dramatic conflict. But director Adrian Panek keeps this a pacy affair, each scene getting to the point as sharply as a protagonist who tells an all-male academic board that they’re displaying the same frivolous “cooing and chirping” as the horny goldfish in her experiment. Navigating institutional sexism, as well as the everyday chauvinism of Lech (Jakub Gierszal), the hunky forester she shacks up with, Drzymalska makes Kossak an admirably independent and cool geek; a able practitioner of the knowing smile and the Paddington hard stare.

It’s bit of a shame that, as it slips into the grooves of the issue movie, the drama doesn’t entirely let Drzymalska off the leash to explore her character’s more feral aspects. “I’d like to penetrate him,” she says of Lech to the local witch, prior to a closeup of her gouging out a mossy tree stump with her hand. But Panek, shooting the woods with spectral beauty, ensures his manifesto is filled with pungent and heady substance. With loggers still circling east Europe’s virgin forests, hopefully this smart biopic will work as a reminder of what Kossak fought for.

• Simona Kossak is in UK cinemas from 13 December.