The Last Family

The tragedies in this family’s life are nearly constant, but Mr. Matuszynski approaches them with a tone that’s matter-of-fact while also partaking in the particular wry irony that has been a hallmark of Polish cinema since the early 1960s.

The film is a remarkable, frequently unsettling exercise in staged voyeurism, recreating the interdependent lives of the three members of the troubled Beksiński family.

Authenticity rules the day here, the contrast between the banality of daily existence and extreme conduct is the main point of the picture, all of it defined by an insistence on staying close to the actual events and refraining from any attempt at psychological observations or analytical motivations.

Thanks to inventive camerawork, mesmeric performances and incisive yet elliptical editing and storytelling, the claustrophobia becomes a feature instead of a liability.

The movie sticks in the mind not as a full-on, time-honored biopic but as a queasily warts-and-all peeling back of a family dynamic that happened to involve a figure of cultish renown.

Like Seweryn, Konieczna is a performer with considerable experience on the Polish stage and she fulfils the same function in the film as Zofia does in the family — holding everything together with an admirably unfussy stoicism.

The film tends to literalize its theme of unfulfilled desire by having characters explicitly lament their lost pasts.