The Third Part of the Night (1971)

WWII. Nazi-occupied Poland. While taking a walk in the woods with his father, Michal's wife, son, and mother-in-law are brutally slaughtered by the Germans. Consumed by grief and a desire for revenge, he decides to join the resistance and kick some ass, but before he even gets a chance to do so, the Gestapo intercept the meeting and Michal flees for his life. He winds up in the apartment of a woman in labor who just so happens to look exactly like his dead wife. The rest of the movie involves Michal wandering around the streets of war-torn Warsaw, participating as a "feeder" for lice used in the manufacturing of the typhus vaccine, engaging in pseudo-philosophical shouting matches, and drowning in his existential angst. The opening sequence is brilliant, an amazingly staged piece of cinema, but after setting the audience up for such heights, the middle of the film really lags. Zulawski obviously loves to fill his movies with cryptic dialogue and narratives that wrap into themselves like a mobius strip, but there is a detachment here, and I am not convinced that Zulawski knew what he wanted to express here. His 1981 film Possession, which is a towering achievement, is such a clear, intense, harrowing, and focused vision, a film straight from the heart, its message rings out in the dark. What Zulawski does excel at here is his evocation of life under totalitarianism, that fear of constantly looking over your shoulder, the paranoia, the ghosts of people long though disappeared bubbling up to the surface. In these areas, he succeeds thoroughly.