Preview By Jon Donnis
Britain's first female spy is finally getting her moment on the big screen. The Partisan tells the story of Krystyna Skarbek, and it arrives this September with its World Premiere and cinema release, courtesy of High Fliers Films.
James Marquand directs, and looking at the trailer, from the first shots it's clear this isn't just another wartime drama. The look of it is striking, shifting between the noise of battle and the tense stillness of espionage. Morgane Polanski takes the lead and carries it with real conviction, while Malcolm McDowell turns up as the shadowy British agent known only as Trenchcoat.
Skarbek herself hardly needs embellishment. Born in Poland, she became the first woman to serve Britain as a special agent in the war, and she outlasted most of her peers. Churchill called her his favourite spy. She was seen as glamorous, fearless, and ended up inspiring Ian Fleming's Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. Not a bad legacy to begin with.
The film starts with her as a restless young woman who seems to thrive on danger. That energy pushes her into the world of espionage, and from then on the stakes only rise. She slips into occupied Poland on a desperate mission tied to her own family, then later finds herself in southern France, embedded as a schoolteacher and trying to hold together a resistance network that's close to breaking.
The cast around her is strong. Steve Waddington, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Frederick Schmidt, Grégoire Colin, Piotr Adamczyk and Agata Kulesza all step in, giving the story a mix of grit and variety. They're not just background players either; each has a hand in raising the tension.
What follows is messy, dangerous work. Missions collapse, betrayal creeps in, and Krystyna is forced to gamble again and again, often against orders. At one point she joins with the broken spy Roger and the defiant leader Armand to bait German hunters into a trap. It's reckless, but it's also the only chance they've got.
By the final act, she's wounded, cut off, and still refusing to run. The mission she chooses then is the one that secures her place in history. The cost is high, but her defiance is the point.
The Partisan isn't just about explosions or covert drops, though it has plenty of that. It's about a woman who decided she wouldn't sit back and wait for history to happen. She went out and changed it, and that's what lingers when the credits roll.
