GOOD HOME. The Pleasant Beginnings of Evil [REVIEW]

There is a now-legendary copypasta about Smarzowski’s (the director of Good Home) films? The same faces in the same movies. Arkadiusz Jakubik as the boozy P.E. teacher, Kuna as the drunken Polish teacher, Więckiewicz as the school principal, and Dziędziel as the visiting deputy minister who vomits on students during a national holiday assembly. Bravo, Wojtek Smarzowski — the pathology of the Polish education system finally held accountable.

That outstanding piece of online culture mocked the author of The Wedding for his repetitiveness, cash-grabbing, and artistic laziness. It also drew attention to the director’s cynical approach to socially engaged cinema: all it takes is to slightly change the topic, cast “the same faces,” and roll the camera. The new, shocking Smarzol practically makes itself — and a few months later, it gathers its “well-deserved” awards for confronting yet another pathology of Polish social life.

As with Clergy (Kler) or Traffic Department (Drogówka), the message of that copypasta proves more or less accurate, but in the case of Good Home (Dom dobry), it completely loses its relevance. And it’s not just because Smarzowski brings in new faces, casting Agata Turkot and Tomasz Schuchardt in the lead roles (with Arkadiusz Jakubik seemingly the only holdover from the old guard, this time as a priest). Good Home is, with all the consequences of that decision, perhaps the most experimental project in the director’s filmography — with nonlinear storytelling, deliberate distortions of time and space, and scenes shot through security cameras and smartphones. All of it serves one purpose: to portray the experience of domestic violence as directly as possible.

Yet it all begins quite innocently. Or so we think. It starts with love — a wild New Year’s Eve party and dancing till dawn, a shared trip to Spain, sex on a plane. Gośka and Grzesiek’s relationship looks idyllic. Smarzowski, however, quietly drops hints — subtle, surprisingly delicate traces suggesting that heaven will soon turn into hell. Before the cable is pulled from the closet, before the fists, belts, and kicks start flying, a precise ritual must take place. The sadist slowly wraps his victim around his finger. He manifests his power through control: sometimes he takes her phone, sometimes the apartment keys. He makes her dependent, aims to strip her of autonomy, convincing her she’s losing her mind.

In Good Home, violence has many faces. Physical, psychological, economic, sexual — one precedes the other, yet ultimately they walk hand in hand. Smarzowski shows us the entire process — the gradual conditioning that leads to the first blow — from the victim’s perspective. Growing up in an abusive household blurs her boundaries, and infatuation with Grzesiek clouds her judgment. “When you look at the world through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags,” to quote a certain animated show about a sad horse.

The first part of Good Home, before the spiral of violence truly unfolds, is the most interesting Smarzowski in years — subtle, stereotype-defying, sharply insightful about reality. But the curse of the Rose (Róża) director is that he doesn’t know the word “stop” — like his heroine, his tolerance boundaries are skewed. When physical violence finally appears on screen, it comes in full force. Smarzowski batters us with repetitions, different versions of the same scenes. He creates time loops, blurs dream and reality, trying at all costs to penetrate the psyche of his battered protagonist. It plays out — as many reviewers of his latest film point out — like torture porn. A test of endurance: how much can we take before we become completely numb?

I understand that the goal is to convey a certain temporal continuity — the brutal everyday life of a person who, day after day, endures an unimaginable level of humiliation, fighting for survival in her own home. But the director presses his message down with a knee, intensifying the trauma through dialogue. The rape of a half-conscious Gośka comes with a line worthy of Patryk Vega’s sensitivity: “Haven’t fucked a corpse before.” The effect is not only distasteful but unintentionally grotesque. There are more such scenes in Good Home — all stemming from the director’s lack of restraint, which in the worst (and thus most sensationalist) moments drags his film toward the borders of exploitation cinema.

The new “Smarzol” divided audiences and critics in Gdynia. The split runs roughly along generational lines — the older crowd appreciates it, the younger ones mostly frown. Some, like my editorial colleague Łukasz Homziuk, even state outright that “there should be no place for such films in Polish cinema.” I do think there’s room for it, even though I’ll never be a fan of The Second Wedding or Good Home. Smarzowski impresses me most because — contrary to appearances and those internet copypastas — he doesn’t rest on his laurels. Thematically, he still circles familiar territory, but formally he experiments. He searches for new solutions, isn’t afraid of risk. His films still are something — they provoke discussion and evoke extreme emotions. How many Polish filmmakers could we honestly say the same about today?