Before watching Mark Cousins's cine-essay A Story of Children and Film, I was unaware of one of the weirdest movies he references: Wrony, or Crows, made in 1994 by Polish director Dorota Kedzierzawska. In Crows, it is not clear if what we are watching is fundamentally innocent or fundamentally tainted. A young girl nicknamed Crow (Karolina Ostrozna) is neglected by her single mum, who is always leaving her alone in the flat, or locking her out of the flat while she is having sex. Angry, lonely and confused, the girl wanders the city – she is at one stage chased and menaced by a creepy male figure on the seashore. Then she kidnaps a toddler from someone's front garden and takes her away, insisting that the infant must call her "mummy", and takes the child to the beach, where she has something momentous in mind. The subject matter is deeply disturbing, yet the film is conducted in a floatingly dreamy manner. It was released a year after the James Bulger case made headlines all over the world, and yet there is no comparable horror or tension. We are not invited to engage imaginatively with the kidnapped infant's parents, but rather with the children themselves, who wander around unchallenged in the uncaring adult world, negotiating their bizarre new parent-child relationship. Sometimes the mood is almost sentimental, and the musical soundtrack (by Włodzimierz Pawlik) is very like Ennio Morricone's score for Cinema Paradiso. The overwhelming impression is one of loneliness, sadness and suppressed fear: running at only 67 minutes, this is a strange, small, flawed gem.