The Shout was not the most inventive, the most beautiful or the most crisply made entry in the last New York Film Festival, but I found it by far the most engrossing. This surprised me, since in the two of Skolimowski's previous films that I'd seen (Bariera, made in his native Poland, and Le Départ, made in Belgium) he had relied on the sixties theme of dissatisfied youth, dressing it up with some neat but obvious visual gimmickry. With The Shout, the theme has gone but gimmicks recur…. [Since] Skolimowski is working here in yet another foreign language, amid the temptation to shift his energies from unfamiliar words to familiar images, he may be praised for showing visual restraint. But negative virtues cannot account for the strong positive impression made by this film.

The search for an explanation led me much further than I expected. (p. 53)

[Both...