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In the six-episode series Women’s Hell, directed by Anna Maliszewska and produced by Ewa Puszczyńska (The Zone of Interest), women in 1930s Poland seek personal autonomy, or just the simple dignity of earning a living or finding a partner, without having to die for either. While feminism and relaxed social mores exist in Warsaw, these ideals are only for some, and usually confined to a class who would rather pay lip service to the rights of women at fancy parties than really do anything about changing their society, which is dominated by males at every turn. One woman decides to try and use her platform to disrupt this damaging, sometimes deadly status quo. Women’s Hell stars Agata Turkot, Hubert Miłkowski, Mateusz Damięcki, Katarzyna Herman, and Maria Kowalska.
WOMEN’S HELL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A woman in a fantastic fur hat drives her burgundy roadster through 1930s Warsaw, Poland to the strains of Nina Simone’s “I Put a Spell on You.”
The Gist: Helena Wróblewska (Turkot) has more than most women. As the classifieds editor at Fortuna Amandi magazine, she wears fashionable flared trousers and helps write poetic messages for lonely men and women who are looking for companionship. She represents the progressive trends entering Polish society. But Helena is unique. The sleek Nina Simone track cuts out as Women’s Hell follows a young working-class woman named Zuza into a broken-down tenement. “Bite down on this, you’ll be fine,” the woman there says, as she flattens a coathanger into shape. Complications from this illegal abortion will lead to Zuza’s death.
At a Warsaw gynecological clinic, where the exclusively male doctors smoke cigarettes in the operating theater, idealistic medical student Emil Heckmann (Miłkowski) complains to the chief surgeon. They should be doing more for women who have no legal or safe medical recourse for unwanted pregnancies. The chief tells Emil his idealism will fade, and that he should get with the program. Go home and take that pretty sister of his out for dinner. That sister is Zuza, and Emil discovers her body in their flat.
Helena is trying for a baby with Maksymilian Wróblewska (Damięcki), her husband who is also the editor-in-chief of Fortuna Amandi. She has been subjected to months of fertility treatments at the clinic where Emil studies, taking heavy doses of arsenic, to no avail. An untested new procedure is encouraged by the surgeon and her husband. They want to implant within her the ovary of a dead donor. Helena is repulsed by the barbarism of it, but when she explains her hesitation and general exhaustion from the treatments, Maks just says she should quit her job. And if Helena can’t have his baby – he’s convinced it will be a boy – Maks threatens to find a wife who will. Between Zuza’s plight, and the friction in her own life, where the progressive perks she enjoys are still at the mercy of her husband, Helena will seek justice and change.
Photo: HBO MaxWhat Shows Will It Remind You Of? Just One Look is a Polish Harlan Coben thriller with the entertaining twists and turns typical of the prolific author’s work. And the themes of Women’s Hell also reminded us of Cable Girls, a period series that begins in the 1920s, about the conflict between women’s independence and male-dominated Spanish society.
Our Take: The title of Women’s Hell could not be any more clear. Helena Wróblewska will face a significant challenge in bringing progressive and feminist ideals to the dominant culture of Poland between the wars. Me Too, in any sense, does not exist, and might not ever, which is illustrated to powerful effect early on in the series. Whether it’s a woman with no support after being raped and becoming pregnant, or a woman who smothered her new baby because she couldn’t afford to feed the 12 children she already had, Poland’s twisted and backward legal system deems these women criminals. It’s disheartening, at times difficult to watch, and made more darkly evocative by the visual aesthetic of this series, which draws on noir and period filmmaking to depict Warsaw as imperious and faceless, unconcerned with the individual.
We believe in Helena’s emerging activism, and look forward to her collaborating with Emil Hermann to seek justice for Zuza and young women like her. But we’re also interested in the dichotomies of her personal life, where she tries to forget her harsh fertility treatments and the wandering eye of her husband by escaping into sex-forward opium dens full of gambling and pornography in sepia tone. Helena enjoys her access to stuff like this. But already in the early going of Women’s Hell, she is recognizing its hypocrisy, as sexual violence and a blind eye from men in power create ever more havoc.
Performance Worth Watching: We really like Agata Turkot here as Helena, and Hubert Miłkowski as Emil, and are looking forward to how their respective crusades for social justice intertwine.
Sex and Skin: Women’s Hell draws a hard contrast between Helena’s enjoyment of her libertine existence – exclusive sex clubs and opium pipes – and the fate of working-class women forced to risk their lives dancing burlesque.
Parting Shot: Helena meets Emil just as the cops arrive to haul him away. “You’re under arrest for aborting your sister’s pregnancy.”
Sleeper Star: Katarzyna Herman (The Ugly Stepsister) plays Roza Milwicz with confidence and intrigue. Roza is also at the intersection of Helena’s professional, personal, and behind-closed-doors lives, making her a key figure as the investigation into Zuza’s death ramps up.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Where were we? At some ceremony with more empty rhetoric?” Emil calls out the posturing of the supposed progressive class. “We spout bullshit about birth control and contraception, about fighting ignorance. What did any of us really do to prevent what happened to Zuza?”
Our Call: Stream It. Women’s Hell well establishes the look and feel of 1930s Warsaw, then challenges the sexist status quo. Helena Wróblewska embodies the ideals of first-wave feminism – for herself, and for all women in Polish society whose voices were silenced.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
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