Starring: Jakub Gierszal, Roma Gąsiorowska, Agata Kulesza
Directed by: Jan Komasa
Rating: ★★★★☆
Only time will tell whether talented, 30-year-old cineaste Jan Komasa is really the prodigy he seems to be. In the meantime, the feeling is that the entire nation is betting on his talent. His new film, about the Warsaw Uprising and using the working title The City, has the personal blessing of Polish premier Donald Tusk and the Polish Film Institute has granted 1.5 million euros for its production.
Sala samobójców (Suicide Room) is not an ode to emo culture aimed at teenagers, but rather a dark tale about addiction to virtual words. Komasa has succeeded in reaching more mature audiences by portraying the self-inflicted isolation of central character Dominik (Jakub Gierszal), an 18-year-old whose wealthy parents pay him little attention. Dominik evades reality by turning to the ‘suicide room’ – a virtual community of potential suicides who adopt Anime-style avatars. Sylwia, aka The Princess, (Roma Gąsiorowska) convinces him to join the group.
In the same way that Gus Van Sant did in Elephant (2003), Komasa has understood that the self-destructive cruelty of youth can be fully evoked on screen simply by using a hand-held camera in the hallways of a college. With more than 20 minutes of highly polished computer-generated animation, Dominik’s polygonal journey into a virtual world represents a crucial step for Polish cinema into a territory thus far unexplored by its filmmakers. Having Denmark-based distribution agent LevelK onboard will hopefully guarantee global circulation.
Originally published by The Krakow Post on October 21, 2011