The Cinematheque

“An intense, original work whose moral force is rivalled only by its technical bravura … If Hitchcock had filmed Dostoevsky, this would be the result.”

Deborah Young, Variety

One of the great (and most fearless) films of the 1980s, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s morally troubling masterpiece was a sensation at Cannes and helped bring about a moratorium on the death penalty in Poland. After he murders a cab driver (Jan Tesarz) in a senseless act of violence, an aimless youth (Miroslaw Baka) faces execution by the state, while his idealistic young lawyer (Krzysztof Globisz), fresh out of law school, struggles to find any defence for the brutal crime. The movie is a feature-length expansion of an episode from Kieślowski’s Dekalog (“Thou shalt not kill”) and, among other elaborations, offers a more immersive experience in Sławomir Idziak’s murky, acid-bathed aesthetic, where darkness is perpetually on the brink of swallowing the image. ​“The world is becoming more and more ugly,” Kieślowski bemoaned, something Killing articulates with unwavering conviction.

In Polish with English subtitles

Jury Prize
Cannes 1988

“One of the central works of Kieślowski’s career … A Short Film About Killing exudes a cosmic foreboding.”

Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine

“Kieślowski’s most fearsomely single-minded film, with cinematographer Sławomir Idziak turning Warsaw into a hellhole of bilious greens and browns.”

Michael Brooke, BFI