Robert Wichrowski’s Tonight You’re Sleeping with Me has a title that sounds like a dare, a line delivered with a raised eyebrow. It promises heat and a character forced to decide. The film itself, a Polish-language drama that reached Netflix on 1 March 2023 and runs 92 minutes, is a much quieter affair. That gap is the first thing you notice, and the film never closes it.

The setup fits in a sentence. Nina Szklarska (Roma Gąsiorowska) is a journalist stuck in a passionless marriage to Maciek (Wojciech Zieliński), a husband who is distant but loving. Then a younger ex-boyfriend, Janek (Maciej Musiał), re-enters her life, and she has to choose. On paper there is something worth having here. The husband is not a brute and the lover is not a stranger, so nobody is easy to hate. A choice between two people you cannot dismiss should hurt, and it should unsettle us too, since we are invited to lean toward one of them without being sure we are right.

It rarely hurts. The reviews that appeared on the day of release were blunt. But Why Tho? called the film simply not good, and Stream It Or Skip It described a rudimentary melodramatic situation executed in a dull, passionless way. I have trouble arguing with either. Love against security is one of the oldest bargains in romantic drama, and familiarity alone does not sink a film. What sinks this one is that it treats familiarity as enough. The plot beats arrive on schedule. The feelings turn up a moment later, when they turn up at all. A marriage worn down by politeness needs scenes where the politeness cracks, and a story about renewed desire needs us to feel the pull before the heroine admits to it. Too often we are simply told that both are happening.

Gąsiorowska has the hardest job, because everything is built around her. She plays a woman whose dissatisfaction is a mood rather than an event, and a mood is hard to dramatise across 92 minutes when nothing pushes back. She keeps Nina contained and does not underline every feeling, which I respected, but the script gives her little to push against. Zieliński’s Maciek is the most promising figure the synopsis offers, since distance and affection coexist in him. I wanted the film to be curious about that contradiction. It seemed more interested in his absence than in him.

Janek is the weaker link, and the fault is not Musiał’s. A reunion with a younger former lover ought to carry some charge: awkwardness, unfinished business, the sense that these two share something neither can easily set aside. Instead he reads as a device, the person the plot needs in order to make the marriage look stale. We are told he matters, and the film rarely lets us feel why. Musiał is stuck playing a temptation that has been declared rather than shown.

The supporting cast is large. Ewa Wencel and Jacek Koman play Nina’s parents, Magdalena Groszek and Jadwiga Żurawska appear as Zuzia and Lena Szklarska, and Małgorzata Mikołajczak, Karolina Porcari and Marta Król play Agnieszka, Eliza Jankowska and Asia. A film about a woman at a crossroads gains a great deal when the people around her argue with her, contradict her, embarrass her. Here the family and friends mostly stay at the edges of Nina’s story, there to react to it. They could have been the pressure that makes her decision cost something. They are scenery, however well cast.

The themes are easy to name. Film Fugitives reads the film as a study of a married woman torn between difficult choices, love on one side and lust on the other. High On Films asks how you deal with a love that never turned into anything substantial. That question is more interesting than anything the film does with it. It poses the question, poses it again and moves on, and the repetition makes a short running time feel longer than it is. By the last stretch I was checking how much was left.

There is a film in this premise, and you can see its outline: a quiet marriage, a returning past, a woman who has to say aloud what she wants. But the characters are kept at a polite distance from one another, and from us. The title promises a night of decisions. What we get is a long conversation about having them.