Art cinema has given us many strange gifts—Buñuel’s eyeball-slicing, Bergman’s chess-playing Grim Reaper, Fellini’s orgiastic carnivals. And then there is Andrzej Żuławski’s The Third Part of the Night (1971), which plays less like a film and more like a 105-minute fever dream induced by bad vodka and a lice bite. It is Poland’s answer to the question no one asked: “What if we turned World War II into a surreal opera about grief, religion, and parasitology, then drowned it in so much symbolism that even Kafka would beg for a glossary?”
Żuławski was aiming for profound, a howl against the void of war. What he delivered was a cinematic migraine, a relentless dirge where every character speaks in prophetic riddles and every hallway is filmed like the waiting room of Hell.
Grief, Lice, and Doppelgängers
The story—or what passes for one—concerns Michał (Leszek Teleszyński), a man who watches his wife, child, and mother butchered by Nazis in the opening scene. It’s shocking, brutal, and promises a film of searing immediacy. Instead, Żuławski wanders off into metaphysical thickets where nothing grows except confusion.
Michał joins the resistance but immediately stumbles into a woman who looks exactly like his murdered wife. She is pregnant, conveniently, so he helps her deliver a baby while having post-traumatic hallucinations. From there, he bounces through Nazi-occupied Poland like a ghost in a Kafka theme park: arguing with nuns about the meaning of existence, meeting acquaintances who vanish into thin air, and endlessly insisting that the new woman is really his dead spouse.
At some point, he becomes a volunteer in a lice-feeding lab, letting parasites drink his blood for science. This is meant as a metaphor for the occupation, but mostly it looks like the worst spa treatment in history. Imagine Schindler’s Listrewritten as Fear Factor and you get the picture.
Surrealism or Just a Bad Script?
Żuławski insists on layering his film with doppelgängers, visions, biblical prophecy, and philosophical tirades. The dialogue is so heavy it should come with subtitles even in Polish. People don’t talk; they declaim. “Where is meaning, law, and God?” one character moans, while another insists we must “fathom the new laws that govern decay.” You half expect someone to ask for another round of pierogi between laments.
The result is not profound but exhausting. Scenes stretch like purgatory: Michał debates Nietzsche with lice-ridden patients, hallucinates his dead wife in every corner, and stumbles into visions of the apocalypse complete with horsemen. If this is allegory, it’s allegory on steroids, and by the hour mark you’d trade all the symbolism in Warsaw for a coherent plot point.
Killed by Metaphor
The film is full of startling images: a masked prophet muttering about dragons and women clothed in the sun; the father burning his violin notes in an inferno; Michał discovering a corpse identical to himself. On paper, it’s haunting. On screen, it plays like an avant-garde music video stretched far past its natural length.
Żuławski cannot resist hammering his metaphors until they collapse. Lice become a motif for survival and infestation; doubles represent grief and memory; apocalypse imagery underscores the futility of resistance. But rather than weaving them subtly, the film shoves them into your face like a child demanding you admire his finger paintings.
The cumulative effect is less “existential masterpiece” and more “student film with a very large budget for candles.”
Performances on the Edge of Hysteria
Leszek Teleszyński, as Michał, spends the entire film looking as if he’s just woken from dental surgery. He staggers, sweats, and screams his way through scenes with the weary eyes of a man who knows he’ll never escape Żuławski’s instructions to “be more intense.” His grief is constant and unrelenting—realistic, perhaps, but monotonous on screen.
Małgorzata Braunek, the director’s muse and partner, doubles as both the dead wife and the new mother. She drifts through the film like a pale ghost, delivering lines with a blankness that could be mistaken for transcendence—or simply fatigue.
Supporting actors fare no better: nuns lecture like failed theologians, friends argue like philosophy majors after three vodkas too many, and Jan Nowicki shows up mostly to remind us that, yes, Polish men can scowl with more gravitas than anyone else in Europe.
The Style: Beautiful Misery
Cinematographer Witold Sobociński bathes the film in stark shadows, tilted angles, and claustrophobic close-ups. It’s beautiful in the way a morgue is beautiful: precise, cold, and utterly devoid of warmth. The editing by Halina Prugar-Ketling adds to the disorientation, slicing scenes into fragments that bleed into each other like bad dreams.
And yet, for all the artistry, the film suffocates under its own aesthetic. It’s misery as style, grief as décor. Żuławski mistakes relentless intensity for profundity, and the audience suffers accordingly.
The Ending: Apocalypse Fatigue
By the finale, Michał has hallucinated enough doppelgängers to fill a bus. He discovers his own corpse, is shot, and crawls into a nightmare corridor of tortured bodies before returning to his villa where his murdered family awaits him like mannequins in a wax museum. Outside the window, the four horsemen of the apocalypse stand, because of course they do.
It’s meant to be shattering. Instead, it plays like a Monty Python sketch gone tragically wrong. After two hours of grief, lice, and existential sermons, the apocalypse feels less like revelation than overkill.
Why It Fails
The Third Part of the Night fails not because it lacks ambition—it’s ambitious to a fault—but because it mistakes confusion for profundity. Żuławski wanted to capture the madness of war, the collapse of meaning under occupation. But his approach is so relentless, so mired in symbolism and hysteria, that the humanity vanishes. We’re left with shrieking, metaphors, and lice.
In a film about grief and survival, the greatest casualty is empathy. We don’t feel for Michał; we endure him.
Final Verdict
The Third Part of the Night is hailed in some corners as a masterpiece of Polish avant-garde cinema. Perhaps it is—if your definition of masterpiece includes incoherence, repetition, and two hours of biblical quotations delivered at full volume. For the rest of us, it’s a cinematic punishment, a lice-ridden sermon masquerading as art.
Żuławski would go on to make stranger and arguably greater films (Possession still curdles blood forty years later), but this early effort feels like a director testing how much pain his audience can bear before fleeing the theater.
The title promises a third part of the night. What you get is the longest night of your cinematic life.
