Watch A Short Film About Killing For Free

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Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

The first must-see film of the year.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Revisiting the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski is a very special experience, both from a cinematographic and a historical point of view. I have seen the 'Decalogue' series almost 30 years ago, and A Short Film About Killing was part of it, in its shorter version. The time that passed since its release and the abrupt ending of the career and then of the life of Kieslowski provide a very different perspective. His films may be the same, and he certainly was one of the greatest film directors of his time and of all times. I had the chance to grow older, see more cinema and accumulate more life experience. The perspective is different, the way we read and understand his movies changed.By 1988 making such a film in Poland meant taking sides from a political, from a moral, and from an artistic point of view. The 80s had begun with the Solidarity movement in Poland which gave the sign of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe at the end of the decade, but in the meantime military rule was imposed and freedom of art expression was limited. Film directors like Wajda took the more political path in their films, while Kieslowski chose the more subtle way of making the ten films that illustrate the Commandments placed in the realities of his country and of his time. 'A Short Film About Killing' deals with the 5th commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' in a superbly constructed plead against the death penalty. The first part of the film builds in a Hitchcock style the story of a murder with no apparent reasons (Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood' comes to mind) . Three characters belonging with three parallel threads will eventually meet in a violent and absurd event. But is not any murder an absurd and repelling event? The second part deals with the punishment of the crime. The young man who committed the murder is tried and condemned to death. We follow his last hours, we start understanding his background, and then, he dies. Absurd as well. An eloquent but one sided demonstration, as his victim has never any chance of pleading for his right to live. This is - maybe - the only flaw of the moral judgment in this story.The construction of the story is perfect. Some of the images remind the French New Wave gangster films, but the background is the tern and grey landscape of Poland with the impersonal architecture that spread over all Eastern Europe. Kieslowski does here one more trick - he used different color filters for each frame that sometime impose yellow or green nuances to the image, some other time darken part of the screen. It's just one more visual comment to emphasize the atmosphere of decay - moral, social, human decay. So far we are from the rosy nuances of the fake 'socialist realism' style. Acting is superb, as in many Polish films of that period, with Miroslaw Baka, shining in the lead role and Krzysztof Globisz supporting him as the lawyer who may be the only positive character in the story. Overall, this film keeps all its dramatic and moral value in time, but also is enriched by the political dimension it receives in the perspective of the time. One of Kieslowski's best movies - highly recommended.

As with many Kieslowski films it starts slowly and one can be tempted to give up but it is never a good idea as most Kieslowski films end up leaving you changed should you watch them to the end. This one did not disappoint. "A Short Film about Killing" is not any easy film. There are graphic scenes. While this film made me disgusted by the brutality of the main characters senseless act the brutality of the state also disgusted me. Though I felt no empathy towards the young man I was repulsed by the state's behaviour. Brutal murder does not negate brutal murder. All the state does when it kills someone as retribution is increase the murder rate. I recommend this film. Kieslowski deals with brutality in a far less morally high handed way than Michael Hanneke does and, I think, his message is all the stronger for it.

In 1985 Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski became acquainted with two men: Zbigniew Preisner and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, both of whom weren't that familiar with film industry. Eventually Kieslowski decided to make his next film No End (1985) with these two men; Piesiewicz as the screenwriter with Kieslowski and Preisner as the score composer. Shortly after the film was released Piesiewicz got an idea to make a film about The Ten Commandments. The idea fascinated Kieslowski but he didn't like the idea to make just a film but to make ten films, each dealing with one commandment. They got their idea working, the Polish television agreed to produce it and Zbigniew Preisner composed a score for each of the episodes. Krzysztof Kieslowski decided to make two theatrical versions of two episodes of The Decalogue (The Ten Commandments); Decalogue five Thou shalt not kill (A Short Film About Killing) and Decalogue six Thou shalt not commit adultery (A Short Film About Love). In each of the episodes of The Decalogue Kieslowski used a different cinematographer and let him to give the film his own visual touch. Decalogue five / A Short Film About Killing was filmed by Slawomir Idziak who also filmed The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and Three Colours: Blue (1993).Three persons whose lives have no connections with each other are presented to us. A taxi driver, a new lawyer and a young 21-year-old boy Jacek. One day Jacek decides to kill the taxi driver for an unknown reason. After the difficult murder he gets arrested and the new lawyer takes his case. Jacek gets sentenced to death and the lawyer is forced to witness the first death of his client. This same pattern is shown to us in the first pictures we see: a dead rat in the gutter, a hung cat and a group of boys (the society) running away. Kieslowski was always interested in the coincidental events that can change the course of our lives. What kind of a turn happens in life when something unexpected happens? There are some turning points in life when important things happen and important choices are made, which can guide our life. "I believe that there are invisible threads that bond people together. The question is to find those threads." - K. Kieslowski. In his earlier film Blind Chance (1981) he dealt with fate and destiny by showing different variations of the protagonist's life.The theatrical version is 25 minutes longer than the television version, but the length isn't the only difference between them. In Decalogue five the perspective is the lawyer's and in the film it is the boy's. The episode studies the commandment thou shalt not kill and the film just killing in general. Many have seen it as a film against capital punishment but Kieslowski didn't intend that. Sure he as a humanist is against capital punishment, but the film is a charge against violence in general. It just happened to be that after the film was released capital punishment was a current topic in the Polish media.To create the repulsive Polish reality the cinematographer Slawomir Idziak got the idea of using colored lens, especially green ones. Green is often supposed to be the color of fresh, new beginning and spring. But when you put them in a camera the world turns into something obnoxious. Kieslowski wanted to show the world which was even uglier than reality. By this technical element Kieslowski was also able to delimit the picture more and delete all the useless things away from it. "Films of today are far too prolix. What isn't necessarily important should be cut out." In addition to the severe aesthetics Kieslowski also took a lot of "useless stuff" away from the storyline. He didn't film the trial of the boy, because it isn't relevant or interesting. "We the people should be interested in people." In his interview book Kieslowski on Kieslowski published by Danusia Stok, Kieslowski says that there were three reasons why he made A Short Film About Killing. The first: death penalty; the fact that someone gets killed by the society of Poland happens in Kieslowski's name because he's a citizen of Poland and he didn't want it to happen. The second reason was that to Kieslowski's mind killing is always wrong, no matter what the reasons were, who got killed and who was the killer. The third reason was that Kieslowski wanted to film the Polish world, which is pretty grim and dull. The audience never gets to know why the boy kills the taxi driver and that is very relevant. What we do get to know are the reasons of the society which rest on the law, but we don't know the true humane reasons - and won't ever know. The film is about killing but also about loneliness; that profound loneliness in us all. All the characters of the film live alone and can't decide about anyone's fate but their own. It's a tale about loneliness which lives in our society, where people desperately try to get connection with each other. In our western world people quite paradoxically want to get out of the fuss and live in peace, miles away from other people. But at the same most of the people say that the thing they fear the most is loneliness; to be left alone.A Short Film About Killing is a charge against violence. Capital punishment is the most radical form of violence one can imagine. The film achieves to bond violence and capital punishment, and to resist capital punishment as a form of violence. It is a profound film about loneliness in us all and how small things can change the course of our lives.

I want to say right off that I think that the photography is by far the best part of this movie and is outstanding in every respect. Since many others have commented on this in far better prose than I'd be able to produce I won't go into it.A reviewer has suggested that the taxi driver was "detestable" as though he was in some way "asking" for his own death. I can't agree. He was just an ordinary human being with good and bad points - for example he gets pleasure out of feeding a stray dog.Other reviewers have suggested that the young murderer regretted committing the murder. Once again, I don't agree. In his conversation with his lawyer we are called upon to pity his predicament. Yet he makes no inquiry about the taxi driver or his family. Quite clearly he didn't care less about him, any more than he cared about the possible consequences of dropping a stone on a car on the motorway, or throwing someone into a urinal.In my opinion he was a thoroughly dangerous young man from whom society needed to be protected.However, the question this movie asks is whether the state achieves anything by committing an equally ugly killing. Since capital punishment is said not to deter killers, and society is already safe on account of the man's incarceration, the killing by the state seems at best pointless.The only thing that might be said to be achieved by killing the murderer is that it saves the state the cost of keeping him in confinement. However there are other ways of achieving this - for example, by requiring the murderer to work in prison to pay for these costs. Therefore the killing can be in no way justified.I consider this movie ultimately to be flawed because Kieslowski allows emotion to intrude. This is especially true in the last scene in which the young man's lawyer is seen to be crying.I believe that these important questions about killing will only be resolved by society if it tackles them in an unemotional way.