Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival, this black comedy finds three people dealing with loss and death in extremely idiosyncratic ways.
Depending on your perspective, the latest film from provocative Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska could be called either darkly absurd or absurdly dark. In a rain-drenched Warsaw, a father and daughter share a dreary apartment, each living a life of not-so-quiet desperation. He’s a widowed coroner so disengaged from life he can barely see the difference between it and death anymore; she’s an anxiety-ridden twenty-something wrecked with an escalating eating disorder and obvious contempt for her father. When Anna, a physical therapist who is becoming convinced she can communicate with the dead, is drawn into the orbit of this dysfunctional duo, the three find themselves struggling to comprehend the state of things in heaven and earth — and, more troubling, in contemporary Poland. Not afraid to find humor in the darkest of places, Szumowska illustrates her character’s spiritual crises with the macabre insight of a contemporary Grimm’s fairy tale. Frank, enigmatic and blackly funny, Body is a film that challenges and rewards in equal measure.
DIRECTOR: Malgorzata Szumowska CAST: Janusz Gajos, Maja Ostaszewska, Justyna Suwała, Ewa Dałkowska, Adam Woronowicz, Tomasz Ziętek, Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik, Ewa Kolasińska, Roman Gancarczyk, Władysław Kowalski LANGUAGE: Polish COUNTRY: Poland YEAR: 2015 LENGTH: 90 min
