What Belongs To Others

“I have no interest in other people’s lives,” says a woman as she’s quizzed about her neighbour Kasia (Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska) by the other woman’s landlady. It’s a sentiment that could be expressed by many of those who populate Polish director Grzegorz Dębowski’s second feature, the wintry weather of which seems to seep into its bones. In his modern world of apartment blocks and estranged family members, even comfort is cold. There’s no respite from the chill of life for Kasia either, whose petty theft boyfriend Darek (Robert Mania, menacing in a small role) is emotionally abusive and whose landlady is about to put her out on the street for unpaid rent.

Stanisław Horodecki’s watchful camera pays attention to Kasia while Kwiatkowska makes stress her defining feature, as though if she were to relax for a second, she might instantly fall apart. Unhappiness radiates from her as she and Darek sneak into a flat block, posing as cleaners, trying doors and, upon finding any open, sneaking in for grab-and-go theft. The fact that nobody takes an interest in their neighbours is the secret of their success. She stumbles on something in one of the apartments, something that makes her flee, but after Darek gets arrested and her landlady changes the lock, she has little option but to return. She knows what she’ll find there. A man whose body may be present but who has permanently left the building.

Dębowski’s psychological drama – which won the Warsaw Film Festival Grand Prix – begins to deepen. Suddenly an opportunity is presenting itself to Kasia. While there are fiscal reasons why she decides to pose as the dead man Piotr’s girlfriend, as she begins to try to track down his family, her curiosity turns into something more. Piotr, it seems, was in an even more tragic situation than she was, in that none of his family has a clue about his life. Neither Dębowski or Kwiatkowska overplays it and the tensions remain around whether anyone is going to smell a rat regarding her cover story. The naturalistic shooting style adds to the sense of unpredictability and by keeping Kasia an ambivalent mix of calculating and vulnerable, Dębowski avoids easy plot beats.

Kasia gradually begins to realise that Piotr’s legacy is offering her something more valuable than money, it’s a chance, if not to completely reinvent herself, then at least to rediscover emotions that go beyond just getting through the next week. While there’s plenty to indicate Dębowski’s melancholic view of society’s increasingly isolated spaces, there’s hope in the suggestion of Kasia discovering that her future choices are something that belong to her and nobody else.

Reviewed on: 19 Oct 2026