118 min | NR | July 23, 2021 | Strand Releasing
Jan Mikolášek heals thousands by studying their urine in a glass flask. He has no medical degree and no warmth for the people who depend on him. When the Communists take power, the gift that made him famous becomes the thing that destroys him.
Jan Mikolášek diagnoses disease by holding a flask of a patient’s urine to the light. He has no medical training. He builds a healing practice that outlasts the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Nazi occupation, and the early years of Communist rule. He treats peasants and party officials with the same brusque contempt. Agnieszka Holland’s film does not ask whether his gift is real. It asks what kind of man can cure thousands of strangers and stay cruel to everyone close to him.
Ivan Trojan plays the older Mikolášek as a closed fist. He gives nothing away. His eyes do the work his mouth refuses. Josef Trojan, his real son, plays the younger Jan and carries the same coiled stillness across the timeline. Juraj Loj plays František Palko, the assistant who becomes the one person Mikolášek wants and the one person he cannot protect. Jaroslava Pokorná plays Mülbacherová, the herbalist who trains him and teaches him that healing demands a hardness most people do not have.
Holland and screenwriter Marek Epstein build the film as a cross-examination. The narrative cuts between the interrogation cell and the decades that led him there. Each answer Mikolášek refuses to give in the present opens onto a memory the audience sees instead. The editing turns his silence into the engine of the story. Holland films the herbalism with clinical attention, the rows of dried plants, the grinding and weighing, the flask raised to the window. The violence, when it arrives, is sudden and unsentimental.
This is a biopic that refuses to flatter its subject. Mikolášek is gifted and devout and capable of real tenderness. He is also a man who lets others suffer to protect himself. Holland holds these facts together and declines to resolve them. The film is austere and deliberate by design, and it asks the viewer to sit with a healer who never earns easy sympathy. That discipline is the whole point.