Some movies are misunderstood. Some are underappreciated. And then there’s Szamanka, a movie that’s less misunderstood than it is misdiagnosed, like a fever dream brought on by expired mushrooms and late-night channel surfing. Directed by Andrzej Żuławski, this is the film that asked the eternal question: what if we combined anthropology, feminism, voodoo gossip, and violent sex into one art-house stew—and then made everyone eat the brain course?
Spoiler: it’s just as unpleasant as it sounds.
The Plot, Or “Fifty Shades of Brain Damage”
The story starts with Michał, a brooding anthropology professor played by Bogusław Linda, who meets a strange, nameless young woman called the Italian. That’s not just a nickname—she’s literally only known as “the Italian,” which is both lazy writing and an early warning sign that characterization has left the building. He offers her an apartment, they seal the deal with violent sex (because of course they do), and from there, things spiral into a sweaty, unwashed mess.
Meanwhile, Michał’s team digs up a 2,000-year-old shaman mummy covered in tattoos and still clutching a pouch of magic mushrooms. Instead of putting it in a museum or maybe calling the police, they decide to eat the shaman’s stash like frat boys at a Pink Floyd concert. Shocking no one, hallucinations ensue.
As Michał becomes obsessed with the Italian—cheating on his fiancée, abandoning his career, and generally behaving like a horny cave man—the shaman’s spirit hovers over the story like a bad smell. And in the grand finale, the Italian caves Michał’s head in and eats his brain, completing what might be the least appetizing metaphor for female empowerment ever filmed.
Michał: Academia’s Worst Ambassador
Bogusław Linda plays Michał as though he lost a bet. His character is supposedly a respected professor, but he spends most of the film looking like a hungover roadie who accidentally wandered into an anthropology lecture. He cheats, he broods, he sulks, and he hallucinates. If he’s supposed to represent male intellectualism, then the brain-eating finale starts to feel less like horror and more like pest control.
The Italian: Free Spirit or Just Free of Characterization?
Iwona Petry, plucked off the street with zero acting experience, plays the Italian with the subtlety of a chainsaw in a library. Rumors in the Polish press claimed Żuławski used voodoo to get her performance—if that’s true, he should’ve asked for a refund. The Italian exists in a limbo between femme fatale and feral raccoon. She bites, she claws, she moans, she gets tattoos, and in one scene, she makes you reconsider whether sex scenes should come with a seatbelt warning.
Is she empowered? Is she a symbol of rebellion? Or is she just an excuse for the director to stage relentless, joyless sex scenes in poorly lit apartments? The answer is yes.
The Sex: Less Erotic, More Exhausting
There’s a lot of sex in Szamanka, but calling it “erotic” is like calling a head wound “decorative.” Every encounter between Michał and the Italian feels less like intimacy and more like two people trying to beat each other to death with their pelvises. By the third time they’re clawing at each other like ferrets in heat, you stop asking, “Why are they doing this?” and start asking, “Why am I watching this?”
The big romantic takeaway is that nothing says love like consensual brain consumption, which really should have been on the VHS cover.
The Shaman: Plot Device or Mushroom Dealer?
The ancient shaman corpse is the film’s supernatural centerpiece, but mostly it just sits there, silently mocking you for watching. He’s covered in tattoos, he’s got a baggie of mushrooms, and his skull is conveniently bashed in like a melon at a Gallagher show. He’s supposed to be mystical and ominous, but he mostly feels like an unpaid extra at a Halloween party.
By the time Michał hallucinates a conversation with him, you realize the shaman isn’t a character at all—he’s the movie’s excuse to combine anthropology with cannibalism in what might be cinema’s worst crossover event.
The Production: Shot on Location in Your Nightmares
Żuławski shot the film in Warsaw and Kraków, and yet somehow made both cities look like the inside of a migraine. Every set is bathed in fluorescent lighting or sticky shadows, as though the cinematographer was allergic to visual appeal. The soundtrack, composed by Andrzej Korzyński, leans heavily on electronic themes that sound like the demo setting on a Casio keyboard. It’s the perfect accompaniment to a movie where the two main moods are “sexually aggressive” and “brain-eating.”
Symbolism, Or How to Pretend Your Movie Isn’t Just Porn With Anthropology
Critics and fans have tied themselves in knots trying to decode Szamanka. Is it about female power? Is it about man’s fear of women? Is it a commentary on Poland’s cultural identity in the 1990s? Or is it just Żuławski making a dare into a movie?
Honestly, it doesn’t matter. You can throw around words like “transgressive” and “subversive,” but when the climax of your film is a woman bludgeoning a professor and eating his brain, you’ve basically thrown subtlety out the window and replaced it with a buffet of gray matter.
Brain Cuisine: The Dinner Nobody Wanted
Speaking of which: the finale. The Italian smashes Michał’s skull and scoops up his brain like she’s hosting a cooking show for demons. It’s shocking, sure, but not in the way the film thinks. It doesn’t feel like catharsis, or art, or even horror. It feels like Żuławski ran out of script pages and decided to end things with a midnight snack.
It’s the kind of ending that makes you sit back and mutter, “What the hell did I just watch?”—which, depending on your tolerance for absurdist cinema, is either a glowing compliment or a war crime.
Final Thoughts: Szamanka, or The Movie That Proves Anthropology Is a Scam
Szamanka is a film that dares to ask: what if Indiana Jones was replaced by two deeply unlikeable people who screamed, clawed, and had sex in between arguments about mushrooms? It’s art-house horror that mistakes shock for depth and brain-eating for enlightenment.
Yes, it was controversial in Poland. Yes, it had feminist undertones. But let’s be real: this isn’t a movie, it’s a fever dream staged by grad students who forgot their thesis and just improvised with nudity, voodoo rumors, and a corpse prop from Party City.
Żuławski wanted to create a haunting meditation on love, obsession, and primal instinct. What he actually made was Fifty Shades of Shaman, a movie that leaves you confused, exhausted, and slightly hungry for a salad—anything but brain.
