Dir: Grzegorz Dębowski | Drama 2026
There is something deliberately claustrophobic about Grzegorz Dębowski’s What Belongs to Others. The camera seems almost unwilling to give its characters room to breathe: handheld close-ups, faces pushed insistently towards the lens, and a restless physicality create a sense of instability that is as much psychological as visual. At times the effect is genuinely unsettling; at others, the constant proximity becomes exhausting, even dizzying.
That claustrophobic tension is central to this tale about a woman who makes her living from ill gotten gains. We see her opening an unlocked door in a random block of flat and on discovering a dead man, taking on the life he has left behind. The premise could easily have become a conventional mystery or social-realist drama, but Dębowski is more interested in the strange emotional territory between trespass and belonging. Kasia is not simply stealing possessions: she is attempting to steal, or perhaps temporarily borrow, an identity and a possibility of another life.
Monika Kwiatkowska gives the film its most compelling element. Her performance is intensely physical, often allowing uncertainty and desire to register before the character herself appears to understand them. The camera’s proximity works particularly well here. We are denied the comfortable distance from which to judge Kasia; instead, we are trapped inside her unease.
Yet the film’s visual strategy can also feel over-insistent. The handheld camerawork and repeated close-ups sometimes substitute agitation for emotional complexity. Rather than allowing a scene to settle and acquire meaning, Dębowski frequently keeps it in a state of nervous movement. The result is powerful when the instability has a psychological purpose, but less convincing when the technique begins to call attention to itself.
More successful is the film’s underlying moral ambiguity. Kasia’s deception is unquestionably troubling, but Dębowski resists making her either victim or villain. The dead man becomes an absence around which she constructs a fantasy of connection, and the film gradually asks a more uncomfortable question: what if taking someone else’s life, however dishonestly, is the first thing that makes your own life feel possible?
That gives What Belongs to Others a melancholy resonance beyond its intriguing premise. Its real subject is loneliness — the hunger to occupy a space in somebody else’s world when your own seems to have left no space for you.
It is an ambitious second feature, sometimes too eager to make its audience feel the character’s instability rather than allowing us to discover it ourselves. But beneath the occasionally dizzying visual assault is a thoughtful and unsettling film about identity, deprivation and the seductive possibility of becoming someone else. Dębowski emerges as a filmmaker with a distinctive visual instinct, even if What Belongs to Others has not yet entirely learned when to restrain itself – an unsettling, visually forceful film whose emotional intelligence is stronger than its occasional stylistic excesses.
VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2026