A Short Film About Killing

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Cristiana O Kieślowski gave us the spiral insanity of cruelty and unfairness that we live with in A Short Film About Killing. From the very beginning, with the mouse and cat scene, he shows us how the world works. At the time, this film was more than just an interpretation of one of the Ten Commandments. It served its purpose, making the country rethink and ultimately abolish the death penalty. The three main characters embody different aspects of this moral struggle. One appears simply malicious, and only at the end do we understand the reasons behind his cruelty. The taxi driver also shows small but telling acts of ugliness, such as refusing rides and frightening dogs. And then we have the lawyer, who seems to see everything with clarity and a sense of justice, but soon realizes that nothing truly depends on him. This is a film that confronts us with the horror of killing in all its forms. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 09/15/25 Full Review Leaburn O The fifth film in the Dekalog series is this simple but captivating story of a murderer and a murdering state. This short story of killing is very effective film making. Watched on DVD. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 12/20/24 Full Review Oliver M Just amazing Never mind the great content…..the filters and camera set ups just mesmerise Timeless too So enjoyable for a film that is unenjoyable Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 11/24/23 Full Review Audience Member The film captures the life of 3 man, a homeless wanderer (Jacek), taxi driver (Waldemar) and a passionate lawyer (Piotr) and how those 3 life intersect each other. To be brief, Jacek murders Waldemar and later, Piotr represent Jacek as his criminal defense lawyer. Most significantly, the film shows how the death of Jacek’s little sister took a mental toll on him which also exacerbated because she died due to his drunken friend. Subsequently, this created a soft spot in Jacek for kids. However, at the same time, this led him to violence. The release of this film provoked and resulted in the suspension of capital punishment in Poland at the time. The sorrow emotions and feelings of Jacek captured in the film transcends that of other Kieslowski’s films as well as of any other Polish film. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 04/29/22 Full Review Audience Member A Short Film About Killing opens with three successive shots: a tree shadow obfuscating almost the entire frame save for a plate festering with cockroaches, half the screen black and the other half showing a dead rat lying in a swamp, and then a similar shot with a cat hanged by its neck while children in the background laughing and playing without even deigning to notice it. Cinematographer Idziak illustrates Warsaw in filthy sepia-drenched tones and obscures the edges of his camera lens with dark filters. And with that, Kieślowski plunges us into a world in which a happy smile is met with a cynical, judgmental sneering and seen as an anomaly, daubs and morasses of mud recur as images of normalcy, and cries for help are lost in the silence of passivity. This is the world where our three characters live, with their lives more doomed than fated to intertwine. Both, the murderer, Jacek, and the victim, Waldemar, lead what are pretty much desultory lives. Jacek is presented as though he's a naughty child who obtains malicious joy at the expense of others. His acts show nothing but childish behaviour, with things similar to sticking gum at desks before leaving or indulging in silly acts of vandalism. But one can sense he does so out of misanthropic despair of human nature as well as a personal burden he carried with him through the years. Still, he seems to have just a hint of innocence as to be able to acknowledge the children around him, who are most likely foredoomed to the same fate. He also still has some memories to cling to, even though they're creased. Something that piqued my interest is how Jacek and Waldemar are, more or less, two sides of the same coin. There's just a hair between the two. The stench of their sleazy world turned Jacek into an embittered teenager whereas it left its mark on Waldemar in the sense of corroding his soul, eroding his humanity, and leaving nothing but lustful impulses and sickening cynicism. As much as the minimalistic approach Kieślowski took here to condemn the societal environment depicted the three characters as clogs in a grinding machine, what's left from Jacek's tenderness proves there's still a glimmer of hope for humanity in spite of how things wind up for him. Moreover, there's yet even more hope when we consider the character of Piotr, the lawyer who's the only one who shows sympathy towards Jacek, even if it's too late. Accordingly, it's with him that Jacek felt like a child again. If I can fault anything with A Short Film About Killing, it's that Kieślowski was blatantly manipulative in the final stretch of the film, raising as much sympathy as possible towards Jacek as he's about to meet his inexorable doom, and Zbigniew Preisner's affecting score amped up this feeling tenfold. Everything is impeccably pulled off, though, so I can partially look past that. A Short Film About Killing is grimy and brutal, and scenes detailing the murder and the execution will linger in my mind for years. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/07/23 Full Review william d This is one of those films where the pace is deliberately kept slow so as to stake it's claim as "artistic." In fact, it's just dull. I was hoping to learn something about Polish criminal procedure, but the film skips the trial entirely. It's basically just an anti-death penalty polemic. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Read all reviews

A Short Film About Killing

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