A Grief Cartoon from the Inside Out
Most animated films want your inner child. Kill It and Leave This Town wants your inner corpse. Mariusz Wilczyński’s painstaking, 14-years-in-the-making feature is an autobiographical, adult animated plunge into memory, mourning, and the kind of existential exhaustion you usually only get from reading Eastern European literature in winter. It’s a psychological horror film, sure, but not because monsters leap out of closets—because the past won’t stop breathing down your neck. It’s beautiful, abrasive, unexpectedly funny in a gallows sort of way, and it feels less “movie night” and more “somebody opened their skull and projected what’s inside.” Wikipedia+1
A City Built from Cigarette Ash and Regret
The film’s unnamed hero—an alter ego for Wilczyński himself, voiced by Gustaw Holoubek—takes refuge in a city of memory after losing the people he loves. Time has stopped; the dead are still alive; no one has yet been snatched away by illness or accident. On paper, that sounds comforting. On screen, it feels like being trapped in a nicotine-stained snow globe curated by Kafka.
The drawings are raw, scratchy, almost ugly in a deliberate way—like sketches made at 3 a.m. when sleep is a rumor and grief is the only thing that feels real. Bodies bend and shrink; faces sag and elongate; the city looks like it’s rotting while you watch. This is “lo-fi” animation, but not in the “we had no budget” sense—more like an aesthetic manifesto. Memory, after all, isn’t HD. It’s smudged, incomplete, and occasionally deeply unflattering. Cinephilic Musings+1
Mom, Dad, and the Ghost of Everyday Life
The people populating this decaying mental landscape are the ones Wilczyński lost and refuses to let go of: parents, lovers, figures from childhood and Polish culture. Janek’s mother (Krystyna Janda), his father (Andrzej Chyra), and Janek themself (Maja Ostaszewska) drift through scenes that feel less like plot and more like recurring dreams—phone calls, train rides, arguments that never quite end, mundane tasks that acquire an eerie glow under the fluorescent lighting of remembrance. Wikipedia+1
The film is filled with mothers, especially—Mariusz’s own mother in both young (Anna Dymna) and old (Barbara Krafftówna) incarnations, like the same soul caught in two bodies wandering the same shabby streets. They nag, they worry, they smoke, they love. The tenderness is often wrapped in irritation, which feels profoundly true; grief rarely gives us angelic versions of the dead. It brings back the whole package, including the way they chewed their soup.
Fourteen Years of Drawing Goodbyes
Wilczyński originally conceived this as a short, but the project grew with his losses, taking over a decade to complete. Wikipedia+2Museum of Cinematography+2 He’s said that the film is his way of saying goodbye to family members he never got to properly farewell, insisting, “I don’t believe in death; they didn’t die, but they live in my imagination.” You feel that in every frame. This isn’t nostalgia; it’s necromancy with a sketchbook.
There’s something darkly humorous about the sheer stubbornness of the thing. Most people deal with grief by seeing a therapist, or at least yelling into a pillow. Wilczyński responded by spending fourteen years painstakingly animating a crumbling, surreal Łódź where his dead refuse to clock out. It’s an act of love, madness, and artistic masochism all at once—and the result is strangely invigorating. If you’ve ever coped with loss by replaying the same memories until they hurt, this film is your patron saint.
Horror, but Make It Existential
Although it’s often labeled a psychological horror, don’t expect jump scares or tidy narrative resolutions. The horror here is existential: the body aging, the parents shrinking, the city decaying, the knowledge that all of this will end and yet somehow never really leave you. The grotesquerie—bodies swollen or shriveled, landscapes that look like they’ve been left out in the rain—isn’t there just to unsettle; it’s a visual language for how memory distorts and exaggerates. The Museum of Modern Art+1
And yet the film is weirdly funny in that dry, “we’re all doomed but may as well smoke” way. Characters complain, gossip, grumble about the world; there are moments where the sheer pettiness of everyday life sits next to cosmic despair and refuses to budge. You laugh, then realize you’re laughing inside someone’s prolonged panic attack. It’s like if your darkest depressive episode had impeccable comic timing.
Voices from a Vanishing World
The voice cast is a small miracle of Polish cinema royalty: Krystyna Janda, Gustaw Holoubek, Barbara Krafftówna, and even the late director Andrzej Wajda appear, lending their voices to this haunted memory city. Wikipedia+1 Knowing that some of these performers themselves are now gone adds another layer of ghostliness; you’re listening to departed icons playing the departed in a film about refusing to accept departure.
Their performances are low-key, conversational, almost mumbled at times, as if you’re overhearing them through thin apartment walls. No one is “acting” in the big, theatrical sense; they’re just being. That naturalism gives the more surreal scenes a kind of ballast: no matter how weird the images get, the voices keep you anchored in something recognizable and human.
Music for a World That Forgot to End
Tadeusz Nalepa’s music drifts through the film like smoke from another room—bluesy, melancholic, sometimes abrasive, sometimes tender. Wikipedia+1 It doesn’t tell you what to feel so much as deepen whatever discomfort you’re already sitting in. At times, the sound design and music blur into a general hum of city life and emotional static, like a radio station broadcasting from the afterlife.
It’s the perfect accompaniment to Wilczyński’s scribbled universe. You’re not quite sure whether you’re listening to a soundtrack or the inner noise of the protagonist’s mind, and that ambiguity is exactly the point.
A Memory Labyrinth, Not a Straight Line
If you’re hunting for a clean three-act structure, you’re going to have a bad time. Kill It and Leave This Town moves like memory itself: looping, digressing, fixating on odd details, circling back to the same people and places with slightly different emotional temperature each time. We’re not told everything; we’re invited to feel our way through.
This is where the dark humor helps. There’s something hilariously stubborn about a film that refuses to be “user-friendly,” yet feels deeply honest about how grief actually operates. Trauma doesn’t show up with a handy exposition dump. It shows up as a smell, a street, a half-remembered argument replayed for the thousandth time. The movie trusts you to recognize that experience and roll with it.
Award-Winning Misery (In a Good Way)
The film didn’t just haunt festival audiences; it impressed them. It picked up major prizes, including Best Film at the Polish Film Awards and honors at Ottawa and other festivals, putting Wilczyński’s late-blooming feature career firmly on the map. Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2 For something this personal and idiosyncratic to resonate that widely is heartening—and slightly funny: imagine spending over a decade drawing your unresolved grief, then being handed a trophy for it. Therapy, but make it prestigious.
Killing It, Leaving It, Keeping It Forever
For all its gloom, Kill It and Leave This Town is ultimately a gesture of love. It’s Wilczyński’s way of saying, “I couldn’t save you, I couldn’t keep you, but I can at least draw you so you don’t disappear.” The title sounds like advice for escaping a toxic place, but the film itself does the opposite: it stays, stubbornly, in the city of loss and memory, until that place becomes weirdly livable.
This is not comfort viewing, but it is strangely comforting—like finding someone else’s diary and discovering they’re just as scared of time, death, and their parents’ mortality as you are. The dark joke of the film is that none of us really kill it and leave town; we carry the town in our heads, forever, populated by people who no longer exist anywhere else.
If you’re up for an animated film that’s less “Saturday night popcorn” and more “existential 2 a.m. cigarette in the kitchen,” Kill It and Leave This Town is a small, haunted masterpiece. It proves that sometimes the bravest thing you can do with your ghosts is give them screen time.
