Officially, Wajda made an adaptation of the Dimitri Shostakovich opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The songs were eliminated while the musical themes remained. Katerina is an unhappy wife of a prosperous peasant. A serf, Sergei, shows up looking for work. Katerina's boorish father-in-law hires the man to be a swineherd. Barely settled on the farm, Sergei flirts with Katerina. Pure animal passion follows, with the two making John Garfield and Lana Turner look like a model of decorum. Unlike Turner or Barbara Stanwyck, Katerina does the actual heavy lifting in dispatching her husband and father-in-law. Like in Cain's novels, the characters' greed leaves them with nothing in the end. Even some of the interior shots suggest Film Noir.

Wajda has an official website where he discusses Siberian Lady Macbeth. This is a film that the critics admired, but that the filmmaker found wanting. While not quite on the level of John Ford, Wajda's exterior shots are worth mentioning for conveying hostile environments, with the farm seemingly adrift in a sea of fog, and close-ups of bare feet marching on rock, snow and mud to Siberia. The story makes a brief nod to Richard III and is titled after Shakespeare's woman who would be queen. By the end of the film, Katerina made me think of another tragic character of film and literature, Mildred Pierce.