Alexandra Makarová’s “Perla” (2025) maps an emotionally fraught journey from stability to disruption. What does it take for someone to wilfully jumble their life? How do purpose, and self-definition rearrange themselves when the foregone resurfaces, pleading readmission? Opening in 1981 Vienna, the film follows the eponymous character played by Rebeka Poláková, a single mother straining to raise her daughter Julia. Perla is an artist so she barely has any resources to fall on. Julia suggests she take up a cleaning job, but Perla instantly dismisses such an idea. Good luck pops up for her when she encounters Josef (Simon Schwarz) at an exhibition and the two fall in love.
Josef has no scruples in quitting the relationship he was in when he met Perla. He accepts Julia as his own daughter, watching out for her at times that supersede the caring attentiveness of Perla herself. Josef has Austrian citizenship and is financially secure, which lures Perla all the more though she denies the thought. The three of them settle into a comfortable rhythm of peace and happiness. Perla’s life is tossed upside down when Andrej (Noël Czuczorher), her ex from Czechoslovakia, and Julia’s father, where she is originally from, re-establishes contact. He is just out of prison and desperately wishes to meet Perla and Julia. All these years he was held captive, she removed herself entirely from his access.
Initially, she balks. A life remade stands imperiled. But she caves in to the reunion when Andrej says he’s dying of cancer. Perla senses she’s about to be foisted into a precarious edge with her just-assembled life ripping at the seams. She is acutely aware of the risk her return to Czechoslovakia entails. The film trusts the ambiguity in Perla’s swinging decisions. Yes, she makes erratic, palpably self-destructive choices. But we are never alienated from the emotional space of those wildly unwise choices.
She gravitates towards reckless moves only to re-locate a semblance of all that she has lost. In many ways, she is seeking closure. The routes she strikes wield damaging consequences, culminating in a distraught climax that can be seen from a mile away. But Makarová is more interested in situating the emotional doldrums within Perla. The one thing she won’t bear being hectored about, however, is being labeled a bad mother. We are never, for once, led into a pulpit where we can caustically judge Perla. Makarová’s filmmaking is compassionate, searching, calling for understanding no matter the reproach Perla’s certain resolutions invite.
Perla hides facets of her past from Josef. She maintains she hadn’t fled Czechoslovakia, which he suspects. As she drifts to the old charms of Andrej, she confronts what she has to reconcile: yearning and resistance, locked deep within her. In a performance delicately oscillating between guardedness and sporadic bursts of vulnerability, Rebeka Poláková anchors Perla. She lends the film a sweeping, specific emotional complexity even while Makarová’s screenplay takes predictable turns. Poláková mines anguish from the tussle between holding onto a wounded but familiar past and a future on an alien land, nevertheless full of surging possibilities.
In her home country, which she has been away from for years, she is met with distrust and cynicism. Compounded by the bleak pervasive poverty, additional pairs of eyes tail her howsoever she behaves. Despite scrutiny and danger thick in the air, she is inexorably drawn into the folds of existing here with Andrej.
She’s torn between thrusting deeper into and receding from the abandoned place. All her buried longing for it wells up. She is battling it, the ground beneath her feet shifting. How can she reinstate her former ties without shattering the life she has rebuilt? Perla burrows into the edge of unease, helpless seduction of danger within the assumption of home. The finale becomes too trite nevertheless its emotional power stays intact.
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