Killing Auntie
2013 · 30m · Polonia
Directed by Mateusz Glowacki
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
Jurek, a twenty-three-year-old history student who lives with the loving aunt who raised him, blames her for his existential boredom and reaches for a hammer, wondering whether life without her will gain brighter colours.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A twenty-three-year-old contemplating murder because life is *boring* — that's the kind of premise that makes everyone uncomfortable in exactly the right way, and Glowacki treats it with enough absurdist deadpan that you can't quite laugh or look away. Nobody else would've had the guts to make ennui this dark and this funny without turning it into a sermon.
The film's restraint is its formal achievement: it resists both the melodrama of psychological thriller and the easy catharsis of dark comedy, instead holding itself in a liminal space that recalls the Polish new wave's obsession with moral paralysis and domestic entrapment.
The genius move is the hammer itself—how Glowacki lets it sit in the frame as pure *weight*, never rushed, never played for shock; that single choice transforms what could've been a gimmick premise into something genuinely unsettling about the gap between thought and action.