Kill It and Leave This Town

The first feature film by acclaimed Polish animator Mariusz Wilczynsk completed over an 11-year production period. There is a lot of stories and emotions connected to the making of this project. The journey surely was not an easy ride for the polish animator who lost his long-time friend and music collaborator Tadeusz Nalepa during the process.

Briefly to the plot, I would say it as a mixture of dreams and memories of Wilczynski's upbringing in the industrial town of Lodz in the 60's and 70s during the dehumanization of life under Communist Poland. The filmmaker himself is part of the play and appears as an obese nude giant and recalls his parents and the socio-political situation in the communist Poland. The story places us in the disturbed head of our protagonist and we see his surreal version of the timeline and slowly descending into madness. From the very first frames, a surreal delirium of suggestions and the symbolic predominates over the laws of rationality. The narrative is reflected visually and metaphorically, and it succeeds in creating such disturbing experience with the scribbly style has an aesthetic at its best. Even the morbid images of human pet, ugly streets, the autopsy, bloody beaked birds, junk sea and the ship contain a right balance and it is not overdone just for the gore quotient. In addition, the music is staged for the surreal effect, stands on its own and manages to set the right accents. Also, I was surprised to see the voice for the old man in the train with the newspaper was done by late Andrzej Wajda.

Final thoughts, the film is a nightmare that gets under your skin visually and plays deep into the consciousness. I would say the film clearly owes a debt to David Lynch and this is not to criticise or say that I didn't love the experience. I did and it was Lynchian, sometimes it reminded me of demo tapes album art from 90s grindcore bands, a little of Ujichaa, little of David Shrigley or Roland Topor, and some Dalibor Baric, Bill Plympton vibes all mixed into one that in several places is close to the grotesque and beautiful. To the fans who possess a love for surrealism and adore the aforementioned artists, check it out I highly recommend that you do so.

Let me start with the good things-the atmosphere of the city is captured really well, and some scenes are quite nice, like the conversation between the dying mother and her visiting son, or the interaction with the shop assistant at the fish market. And for me, that's about it. First of all, this is totally not my aesthetic, but that doesn't take away my right to express an opinion about the film. The aesthetic, it is clear - is deliberately ugly and rather spooky, even scary. It reminds me of the situation when, as a child, films of this style (maybe from the same creator) appeared on TV, and I remember how much that ugliness hurt me and how much anxiety it caused. I didn't understand why it was being broadcast. Many years have passed, and my feelings haven't changed much.

The plot, despite being ultra slow, is quite chaotic. You could get confused between Janek and Mariuszek. It's also unclear why there are so many nipples. When certain attributes (in this case, nipples) appear excessively in a work, you might infer some kind of weakness or even complexes of the creator. Okay, we all have them, but do we need to know about this weakness in this movie? I don't believe that was the goal. Do I need to know that Mariusz Wilczynski has a nipple obsession when that wasn't the point of the film? Overall, the balance between disturbing and profound leans much more towards disturbing, and it's not a good experience. I understand that it wasn't supposed to be pleasant, and I understand that it was meant to provoke discomfort, but it does so in the wrong places.

Several famous Polish people related to culture gave their voices to dub this film. Subsequently most of the audience thinks the movie is deep.

There's so very much for us to try to take in here, and honestly, it's not the easiest to try to digest. Over the course of ninety minutes the dominant ethos is far-out arthouse surrealism that forgoes most any sense of cohesiveness, or a through-line, let alone reality, making it difficult at any moment to ascertain what the filmmaker's vision actually is. Amidst this bizarrerie we're further treated to violent and disturbing imagery, blood and gore, character designs that range from the recognizably human to the barely human, reflections on death, mortality, cruelty, and loneliness, and more. The style of animation is unquestionably simple on the face of it, yet is surprisingly varied and clever and belies a substantial amount of detail at times - shading, texture, fine lines and minutiae, color, lighting, and more. 'Kill it and leave this town' is a strange, abstruse experiment, but I'd be lying if I said it weren't well made and fascinating in and of itself.

Truthfully, for all that the picture offers up at one time or another, by and large it's so far-flung and disparate in its visions that even with a clear-cut premise provided from outside context it's hard to put together what Mariusz Wilczynski is doing. It seems to me that it's only in the last third of the length that a measure of unity of vision is established, and still the thoughts underlying some scenes elude me. Suffice to say that what one gets out of this will vary wildly from one viewer to the next, and I don't really know who I'd recommend it to except for those who are open to all the extremely wide possibilities of what cinema has to offer. It's not that I don't like this film, but only that I genuinely don't know what to make of it. Assumptions based on a modicum of outside context - that is, Wilczynski's own statements that it echoes how he keeps alive in his imagination those who he has lost - only get one so far. I think this is worth watching on its own merits, and in recognition of how much hard work went into it. I also think that unless you're a cinephile who is receptive to anything and everything that you may come across, 'Kill it and leave this town' is going to be something that's well beyond the capability of many audiences to sit with.