Directed by: Julia Rogowska
Starring: Agata Kulesza, Dobromir Dymecki, Bartosz Bielenia, Michalina Łabacz
Rating: ★★★★☆
The cultural taboo surrounding women’s aging is hardly exclusive to Hollywood. Now Polish cinema takes on this evergreen theme, one that seems destined to endure on the big screen. In Czas, który nie nadszedł (The Time That Never Came), Sara (Agata Kulesza), who refuses to undergo anti-aging treatments, stands in sharp contrast to Elisabeth Sparkle, Demi Moore’s character in the body-horror film The Substance (2024). While Sara rejects the pressure to drink the “elixir of eternal youth”, Elisabeth is willing to resort to drugs that create temporary younger versions of herself in her struggle to survive in show business.
From this perspective, it hardly matters that both Moore and Kulesza have publicly distanced themselves from anti-aging culture. In Julia Rogowska’s debut feature, Kulesza, a familiar presence in the cinema of Pawlikowski and Smarzowski, gets to inhabit a character whose acceptance of aging echoes her own public stance, while resonating with that of actresses across the world who have chosen to embrace growing older rather than fight against it.
An anti-ageing treatment allows people to stay fit and young until they reach their deadline upon turning seventy. The non-compliant citizens who cherish the right to grow old and die are confined to a gated refugee center. Sara bribes the staff of the facility and manages to slip away concealed in the van of the camp supplier, Ed (Bartosz Bielenia). Her new life in hiding brings her to knock on the door of her former lover Oskar (Dobromir Dymecki), who, like many others, underwent the therapy.
The Time That Never Came, without special effects, exposes a society that is ready to embrace a life in the fool’s paradise of fixed-term youth just to be like others. While there is no need to compare it to the cinema of moral anxiety, a movement that took Polish cinema by storm in the Seventies, Rogowska’s first feature is a punchy cinematic pamphlet on the ever-growing conformism of people in a not so distant future in which all birthdays look the same.
The people surrounding Sara eat raw vegetables and live in the uncontaminated City of Youth, only to die when their deadline comes. As an absurdist drama, The Time That Never Came has something of the Greek Weird Wave aesthetic. Whether it is a coincidence or not, Ed displays in his vehicle’s cabin a lobster figurine that evokes the title of Lanthimos’s dystopian drama.
Kulesza’s most recent performances in this film and the crowd-puller The Doll prove that she is doomed to get new leases of life around every corner of her career. The Time That Never Came has the narrative potential to be remade outside Poland. Not surprisingly, the film received 8 minutes and 36 seconds of applause at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on November 6, 2026