In 2014, few films are simple. We occupy a culture of instant gratification, where time itself has become a phantom. The act of waiting is seemingly lost, where home-cooked meals are traded for Chick-fil-A, and any movie, song, or book is two clicks away. The blockbuster aisle waddle, where you walk with an awkward gait as you scan shelves in slow motion hoping to find just the right rental, has become a relic of the ‘90s and the ‘00s. No longer are we a patient people, and the movies, with their third-act CGI vs. CGI battles, roaring scores and over-elaborate plotting, are a sad and evident reaction to the latest cultural paradigm. I expect that from movie studios, but, maybe naively, I don’t expect that from independent and foreign films. But those too have been poisoned. That’s not to say they’re bad—Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac is embellished and labored but also great. But Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida bravely embraces the simple way to tell, and more importantly to show, a story. It couldn’t have come at a better time, acting as a startling but refreshing reminder to the power of simplicity.

I expect I doth protest! emails pointing me towards Jonathan Glazer’s uber sleek and simple Under the Skin, but nothing in that film reduces its content to its bare possible minimum the way it is done in Ida. Here, Pawlikowski is at a career high of ambitiousness, with the sure-handed confidence he can do so little to move you so much. Ida hopes for nothing less than to tackle the geopolitical landscape of 1960s Poland, intertwining Jew politics, Nazi politics, communist politics, religious politics, and feminine politics into a reduced, focused story about an 18-year-old nun on the cusp of taking her vows. She’s sent to an old Aunt (Agata Kulesza) whom she has never met, a daunting task since we learn she’s spent her entire life in relative seclusion at a religious convent—this is her first full journey to the outside world. What follows is a delicately told odyssey into a past best left undiscovered, and she wrestles with history just as she wrestles with a world that was previously unknown to her.