Young Polish nobleman Jakub is saved from imprisonment by a stranger. In return, the stranger wants to obtain a list of Jakub’s fellow conspirators. As he follows his mysterious savior across the country, Jakub is affected by the overall chaos and moral corruption; he goes insane and becomes a mass murderer.
Director: Andrzej Zulawski.
Stars: Wojciech Pszoniak, Leszek Teleszynski, Malgorzata Braunek, Iga Mayr, Wiktor Sadecki, Michal Grudzinski, Maciej Englert, Monika Niemczyk, Bozena Miefiodow, Marian Zdenicki, Anna Parzonka, Lukasz Zulawski, Jerzy Zygmunt Nowak, Eugeniusz Priwieziencew.
this is a must see film. Thanks Jon
This HD Blu-ray version is so dark. Some spots are indistinguishable. So much detail is lost from the heavy blacks. The DVD is much clearer.
The Polish Ken Russell/Paul Verhoeven on steroids – straddling the fence between exploitation, art-house and over-the-top satire. He makes fascinating but often totally irrational “lunatic asylum” cinema, in that in order to escape the boring limitations of the oldest cliche in the world, the dramatic (traumatic) form, and still have an audience, he deliberately sets up irrational and traumatic situations (and therefore still dramatic or fear & conflict based though following the logic of the irrational or the unrestrained impulses, that of the wild animal) where non-stop spastic actions reign and even moderately measured and reasonable behavior of any kind is almost entirely absent. This film has some amazingly beautiful shots and visually it totally held my interest and told its own tale in my head (constructed by my own imagination based on Zulawski’s point of departure) whereas the absurd and deliberately shocking situations, the stock and trade of Zulawski, held little interest, since they were as expected and foreseeable as all the most boring dramatic cliches. Marketa Lazarova or Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors this film definitely isn’t but because of its very irrationality it also has images you won’t see anywhere else except maybe inside a loony bin. .