Lars Ahlin’s 1945 short story Kvinnan och döden, on which Väntande vatten is based, jumps back and forth between two perspectives: a woman’s interior monologue and the description of what she’s doing while following her train of thoughts. Werner crafted a dense and intense exercise in real-time cinema out of this: the camera stoically observes Anita Björk on her long walk from the waterside through a park without flinching. Well, almost, for there’s one decisive cut away, but everything else is (or at least feels) uninterrupted. To this, her reminiscences of failed relationships and men’s vileness are incorporated. In the end, screaming, white noise and a loss of focus blur, bleed into a vision of spiritual collapse.  

Olaf Möller and Jon Wengström