SXSW 2025 Review: GLORIOUS SUMMER, Three Women Seek Freedom From Their Gilded Cage

Three women exist in an abandoned castle, bound by rules and rituals disseminated by disembodied voices, unburdened by want, but trapped in a dystopian wonderland they cannot leave in directors Helena Ganjalyan and Bartosz Szpak’s Glorious Summer.

An ennui laden mix of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth and John Boorman’s Zardoz, Glorious Summer explores the inner struggle between the desire for comfort and safety and humanity’s innate desire for free well. There are times where it feels more like a thesis than a feature film, but Ganjalyan and Szpak inject enough modest humor and intrigue to keep the audience hooked, even when things seem to be approaching the brink of esoteric exhaustion.

The three unnamed women, a leader type played by Magdalena Fejdasz, her close confidant played by Ganjalyan, and an innocent played by dancer Daniela Komedera, seem to live in a kind of timeless Shangri-La. They want for nothing; they spend their days playing in the sun or resting – whichever they feel like doing – and they eat and drink to their hearts content. It’s a captive paradise. The weather never changes; however, occasional explosions rock the lands beyond the wall that confines them, indicating that the world outside is volatile and unpredictable.

The two older women, Fejdasz and Ganjalyan, have developed a kind of touch langue they use to avoid the scrutiny of their all-seeing, all-hearing stewards; and it soon becomes clear that they are planning an escape. They develop death faking drills, which they believe will be their tickets out of their banal existence. Their younger partner doesn’t know their plans but enjoys the camaraderie of these drills and trusts her sisters innately. As their patience wears thin and their escape grows imminent, a former housemate reappears, throwing everything into chaos.

Ganjalyan and Szpak clearly have a lot to say about the battle we all fight between our need for security and our need for freedom. That message is not subtle in Glorious Summer, but the way they express this inner struggle with sometimes blatant outward conflict in the film is fascinating. Not a film that is likely to garner a huge amount of attention from the mainstream crowd, Glorious Summer stands a decent chance of appreciation from those who enjoy a bit of mystery in their cinema.

Beautifully shot by Tomasz Wozniczka, a relatively as a director of photography who worked on popular Polish films like I, Olga Hepnarova and Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing, Glorious Summer couches its big ideas in luscious imagery. Bathed in natural sunlight and neutral tones, the visual palette adds to the dissonance between the women’s needs and wants and their comfort in the film. Why would anyone ever want to leave a place this beautiful?

Both a cinematic conundrum and an at times too-obvious metaphor, Glorious Summer is one of those films that is likely to find success on the festival circuit, and with a certain segment of adventurous arthouse film lovers. Ganjalyan and Szpak deliver a film of complex ideas, beautiful images, and a sense of gilded captivity that will really work for a dedicated cross-section of viewers.