Elegy for the Unseen Operatives

Read Time:6 Minute, 9 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
The Partisan
–

Genre: War, Spy, Thriller, Biographical
Year Released: 2024, 2025
Runtime: 1h 48m
Director(s): James Marquand
Writer(s): James Marquand
Cast: Morgane Polanski, Malcolm McDowell, Ingvar E. Sigurðsson, Frederick Schmidt, Agata Kulesza, Steven Waddington, Piotr Adamczyk, Grégoire Colin
Where to Watch: in UK cinemas October 3, 2025, home release October 27 from High Fliers Films

RAVING REVIEW: THE PARTISAN approaches a towering legend with reverence and a cool head. Building a narrative around Krystyna Skarbek—Britain’s first and most daring female spy—should be a layup for tension and complex moral stakes. The elements are here: clandestine routes through occupied Poland, a web of informants, and betrayals that cut both personally and politically. What emerges, though, is a careful, even tasteful spy film that often plays as if it fears its own pulse. It’s earnest, staged, and led by a committed performance from Morgane Polanski, yet the story’s sparks don’t catch fire as often as they should. The result lands in that frustrating middle ground: a subject worthy of greatness delivered at a steady simmer.

Polanski anchors the film with a conviction. She never reduces Skarbek to iconography; the character reads as a professional who has learned to mask nerves as composure. Small gestures—how information is weighed before it’s spoken, the way a room is measured for exits and listeners—sell the hard-earned instincts of someone who’s outrun death more than once. The film is at its best when it lets her navigate tight corridors of suspicion: coded exchanges at safehouses, tense rendezvous where every nod could be a nod to a trap. Opposite her, Malcolm McDowell’s satirically named Trenchcoat offers dry intelligence-world gallows humor and a lived-in sense of bureaucracy; he’s not so much a puppet master as the weary custodian of a machine that eats its own to keep turning. Steven Waddington and Ingvar E. Sigurðsson add texture on the periphery, credible as men who learned long ago to compartmentalize too much.

The first major area that falters is the film’s structure. The opening movement builds intrigue with brisk, specific beats—names exchanged, passwords tested, eyes clocking exits—but once the betrayal that compromises Skarbek lands, the script pivots into a more familiar run-hide-repeat cycle. Instead of escalating complications that deepen character, we get plot checkpoints that feel dutiful: an extraction attempt, an interrogation, a pivot through a new contact whose motivations register as a line of dialogue rather than an internal conflict. It’s not that the events are implausible; it’s that the sequencing rarely surprises. For a story defined by risky improvisation, the path through its middle acts is overly tidy, easing us from scene to scene when it should shove us.

The second major issue is tension. Spy stories thrive on the weaponization of uncertainty—who knows what, when they know it, and how the wrong assumption will ruin you. THE PARTISAN sets those questions on the table but too often resolves them before the air can thin. A potentially combustible encounter will announce its danger and then neutralize it within the same exchange; an ambiguous ally declares their nature before we’ve had time to doubt them. When suspense spikes, it’s because the film trusts silence and watches Skarbek think—how she clocks the rhythm of footsteps outside a door, how she chooses which lie will be easiest to maintain. More stretches like that—lived-in, process-oriented, unafraid to linger—would have paid dividends.

On a thematic level, the movie explores the corrosive math of occupation: any victory comes at the cost of a loss the public won’t see. The best passages honor that. Skarbek’s choices are framed not as acts of bravado but as negotiations with time—how long can a cover hold, how much truth can be spoken without collapsing the structure that depends on the lie. The screenplay hints at the gendered terrain of espionage in a male-dominated war effort, and while that line could have been explored further, Polanski’s performance fills gaps the text leaves unexplored. You sense the constant calibration: to be underestimated enough to slip by, never so much that command forgets your value.

It’s hard not to think this story might have been sung as a limited series. There’s enough intrigue in Skarbek’s network, enough moral ambiguity in her handlers, and enough potential for mission-by-mission escalation to justify the longer runway. Spread across four to six hours, the betrayals could land with bruises that stick, and side characters could graduate from function to person. In feature form, the film must choose what to compress, and those compressions most often flatten the human contradictions that make a legend feel newly alive.

Still, there’s value here. The film refuses to turn Skarbek into a simple myth. It treats courage as a practice, not a pose, and it respects the incremental, exhausting labor of staying one step ahead in a world built to erase you. When the final movement lands, it lands not with fireworks but with the quiet recognition that some victories can only be measured by the fact you’re still breathing. That modesty may underwhelm viewers expecting a pulse-pounding barnburner; for others, it reads as the point.

Taken on its own terms, THE PARTISAN is a fine, sometimes absorbing wartime spy tale with a remarkable figure at its center and filmmaking that seldom squanders her, even if it rarely elevates her to the heights the legacy deserves. I wanted sharper suspense, more daring structure, and a deeper excavation of the personal stakes. What’s here is competent, respectful, and intermittently gripping—enough to admire, not quite enough to remember without prompting. As an introduction to Skarbek’s story for audiences unfamiliar with her name, it serves its purpose. As a definitive statement on her legend, it stops short of the line it needs to cross.

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[photo courtesy of HIGH FLIERS FILMS]

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