In a major improvement over her earlier film Elles (2011),
winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival, a
prize shared with Romanian director Radu Jude for AFERIM! (2015), the film
resists any conventional narrative by initially concealing any storyline, disguising
its intent in the first half hour by thriving in a seemingly aimless universe
driven by an underlying comic absurdity revealed at the outset when a coroner,
Janusz Gajos from THREE COLORS: WHITE
(1994), is called in to investigate a ghoulish scene where a man is seen hanging
from a tree, but when the rope is cut, lowering the man to the ground, the
victim miraculously regains consciousness and scurries away in embarrassment,
leaving the police on the scene thoroughly baffled. Polish films in general all seem to dwell on
the subject of post-Communism, where this one is no exception, as the nation is
still searching to redefine itself in the modern era. Using the Kieslowski template, the director
interconnects three disparate characters living in completely different worlds,
an alcoholic coroner who spends much of his professional life visiting grisly
crime scenes examining dead corpses, his anorexic daughter Olga (Justyna
Suwała) who, after the death of her mother, has learned to despise him for
being so clinically coldhearted, and a kindhearted therapist, Anna (Maja
Ostaszewska), who has the ability to speak with the dead, including her own
deceased child, continuing to lead her mother to believe the child is still
alive and growing, each of which calls into question the difficulty of
Heidegger’s philosophical notion of Being-in-the-world,
which includes not just the here and now, but includes the past moving toward
the future, where life as we know it has an unknown dimension that speaks to us
from the beyond.
Taking place in the dreary, rain-soaked atmosphere of
Warsaw, the coroner is a no-nonsense man spending time studying graphic photos
of the dead on his computer, taking detailed notes for his reports, considering
himself a man of reason and science. And
while it appears he leads a sad, lonely existence living in a drab apartment
still haunted by signs of his deceased wife, though she passed away several
years ago, it has left him in a state of permanent indifference, seemingly incapable
of raising his daughter or showing the least bit of affection. So when he finds her passed out at the toilet
following her habitual practice of vomiting the contents of her stomach, he
brings her to a hospital for long-term care.
When we meet Anna initially she is staring out into space while her hand
seemingly has a life of its own, jotting down various auto comments that she
hears in her contact with the dead.
While there’s an inherent seriousness with the enveloping mood of the
subject matter, this is contrasted by the enormous size of Anna’s dog, that is
simply too big to be hopping onto the sofa or into bed with her, but like an
insecure puppy, this dog is forever climbing into her space, where living alone
in a small apartment, she is dwarfed by the hugeness of this animal, where its
hulking size prevents her from eating without disturbance or even seeing the
television. While Anna is assigned as
the unconventional therapist for a group of young girls with eating disorders,
including Olga, who is forced to eat in its entirety some colorless mush-like
substance before she can participate in group sessions, the scene is made even
more shocking by shooting the entire group in an alarmingly noticeable all-white
room, as if they are being bathed in an atmosphere of purity.
Often introducing brief scenes with comic vignettes or
something offbeat, as the coroner is paying a visit to the hospital, Anna
senses his dead wife is trying to contact him, and communicates this message to
him, sensing a drowning feeling, which he initially finds ridiculous, only to
discover afterwards that the site of her grave has been flooded from the recent
rainfall. As if somehow connected, weird
things start happening in his apartment, where creaking doors keep opening, the
record player turns itself on by itself, and leaking faucets appear to be
mysterious attempts by his wife to contact him.
Anna suggests he leave a blank paper and pen out for her to write
something. This is contrasted by a
simply bizarre scene of the coroner suspended in a moment out of time when
apparently his middle-aged wife or a significant other (Ewa Dalkowska) is
happily performing a naked dance to Republika’s “Death By Bikini,” Republika - Śmierć w bikini (5:06), a
Polish new wave band of the 80’s. This
brief sense of sensual liberation is outside the realm of anything else we see,
which is a coldly repressed universe with inexplicable episodes of gruesome violence,
which are the often horrific crime scenes the coroner is continually called in
to investigate, like the discovery of a dead baby found in a pool of blood in
one of the lavatories of the Warsaw train station, where the director chooses
not to show the infant, but instead highlights the reaction of the policemen
who refuse to go anywhere near the body, reflected as well by the fear of a
poor, helpless stenographer who has been dragged along by the coroner and
forced to witness his seemingly apathetic on-the-scene demeanor.
What the coroner does concern himself with is the unorthodox
practices of Anna, which includes the use of primal scream therapy and makes no
secret that she believes contact with the deceased helps in the emotional
healing of patients, including Olga, who is making progress under her
guidance. Nonetheless, he speaks with
the appropriate authorities to have her dismissed, insisting the world reflect
his rational views. When Anna suggests
to him that the murder of the newborn would probably never have happened if
abortion was legal, then asking him “What happens when these children
die?” “Probably nothing,” he responds
passively, suggesting he has little connection to the human soul. While the script lacks any real complexity,
and the one truly interesting character of the psychic medium is largely
undeveloped, yet the absurd approach evidenced throughout offers a bleak
alternative, suggesting there is more than meets the eye. Despite the cris-crossing storylines and
crimes that are literally left lingering in the background, the emphasis of the
film shifts to an uneasy father-daughter connection, where the distance and
uncertainty of their relations leads to an uneasy alliance, reluctantly
agreeing to utilize Anna’s gift to contact the dead mother whose restless
spirit demands to be heard. Eventually
holding hands for an evening séance that extends through the night, the
director cleverly challenges the expected cynicism coming from viewers, finding
an altogether unexpected twist to salvage the loose ends of a barely stitched
together narrative, making excellent use of the Gerry and the Pacemakers song
“You’ll Never Walk Alone,” Gerry & The Pacemakers -
You'll Never Walk Alone - YouTube (2:48) which both opens and closes the
film, finding a transcendent note from a pop ballad, turning an offbeat ghost
story into something uplifting and recognizably humane.
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