Englert, Michal

There’s a stranger in town, and his touch is hypnotic, which is just what these icy, disaffected people needed.When Zenia (Alec Utgoff), a handsome masseur with an enigmatic smile, arrives at a wealthy gated community in Poland, he quickly gains a reputation among the depressed locals for his extraordinary — perhaps even magical — healing abilities. It doesn’t hurt that the majority of his clients are anguished women, and that Zenia’s warm, attentive touch purges them of their routine misery, if only for a little while.From Edward Scissorhands to Peter Sellers in “Being There,” the curious outsider figures as a spiritual balm to their bourgeois malaise. In many ways, “Never Gonna Snow Again,” which the Polish filmmaker Małgorzata Szumowska co-directed with the cinematographer Michał Englert, follows suit.Zenia, a Ukrainian migrant worker born exactly seven years before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, is no otherworldly idiot — though the condescension he faces suggests his employers believe otherwise.As Zenia becomes a community fixture, the lives of his alienated clients unfold in a series of vignettes, at turns bleakly somber, but also cheeky. We meet, among others, a housewife overwhelmed by her impudent children; an alcoholic woman obsessed with her three bulldogs; a bohemianesque widow whose creepy son manufactures synthetic drugs. Bored, they begin to lust after Zenia while dealing with their anxieties around class, climate change and Polish identity — issues that Szumowska and Englert subtly integrate, yet leave opaque.From the sterile symmetry of the neighborhood, composed of lifeless McMansions, the film cuts away to glimmering images of a shadowy forest, moments of uncanny enchantment meant to visualize the sublime experience produced by Zenia’s hypnosis sessions.Utgoff is irresistibly compelling, instilling in his character a silent yet singular presence worthy of the “superhero” status that he ultimately acquires. Yet Zenia, the flesh and bones human, emerges in fragments — a shimmying dance routine, a moonlit scooter ride with his security guard pal — indicating there’s much more here than meets the eye, if we could only truly see.Never Gonna Snow AgainNot rated. In Polish, Russian, French and Vietnamese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More