The starting point for the plot was the filmmaker’s family history. Lucjan, a retired theatre actor, is put in a nursing home by his son. Situated in the countryside, the residence seems idyllic, with friendly staff ready to help and welcoming residents. However, it turns out that it hides a secret… Macabre visions haunt Lucjan. This coincides with the deaths of several residents. Lucjan will have to determine if his visions are real or if he is losing his mind. 

Director and scriptwriter Bartosz M. Kowalski clearly knows how to surprise. His ambition has always been to create each of his films to resemble nothing we have seen in Polish cinema. Therefore, after documentaries with a social flair, well-acclaimed, he made the feature film “Playground” (2016, award at the Gdynia Film Festival for debut or second film), which shocked some audiences. And then, to the great surprise of commentators, he turned to genre cinema, focusing on different varieties of horror films. This led to two Polish slashers, ‘Nobody sleeps in the woods tonight’ (2020, 2021), with surprising twists and turns, and the more traditional horror film ‘Hellhole’ (2022). Kowalski is a connoisseur of this type of cinema. It is not difficult to find references to the genre’s classics in his work, which he also became well acquainted with when he was very young. At the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, Maciej Damięcki was posthumously awarded the Perspectives Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution – for ‘an outstanding, brilliantly changing role, balancing on the border between realism and metaphysics, daring and transcending life and time’.

Q&A – Anna Nehrebecka; moderator – Łukasz Maciejewski

Screening as part of the project: FILMOKRĘGI