On what Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida (2013) achieves in its formal restraint.

Ida is a film about a young nun in early 1960s Poland who discovers, before taking her final vows, that she is Jewish and that her parents were murdered during the war. She travels with her secular aunt to investigate.

The film is shot in the 1.37:1 Academy ratio, in black and white, and with a compositional style that consistently places the characters in the lower portion of the frame, with empty space above them. The empty space is not dead space. It's the weight of the sky, the weight of history, the weight of whatever is above or absent or gone.

The visual grammar of Ida is one of the most precise formal arguments in recent cinema. The film is making a claim about the weight of the past on the present through its choice of aspect ratio (historical), its choice of monochrome (monochromatic as a register of grief), and its compositional choice to keep its characters small within large frames.

The performance by Agata Trzebuchowska as Anna/Ida is largely composed of listening and watching rather than speaking — she is learning who she is, and the learning is visible on her face in ways that require the film's close attention to that face to communicate.

Ida won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and then Pawlikowski made Cold War, which is even better. Both films are the kind of formal precision that only emerges when the formal choice and the thematic argument are completely unified.