Synopsis
Beksiński is a gentle man with arachnophobia, despite his hardcore sexual fantasies and his fondness for painting disturbing dystopian works. Beksiński is a family man who wants only the best for his loving wife Zofia, neurotic son Tomasz and the couple's aging mothers. His daily painting to classical music eventually pays off and he makes a name for himself in contemporary art. Good Catholic woman Zofia tries to hold the family together, but troubled son Tomasz proves to be a handful with his violent outbursts and suicidal threats. Their relief is brief when he starts dating women and becomes a radio presenter and movie translator, and the concerned parents must be on constant watch to prevent their son from hurting himself. But Beksiński never believed that family life would always be sunshine and rainbows. As he tapes everything with his beloved camcorder, the 28-year Beksiński saga unfolds through paintings, near-death experiences, dance music trends and funerals...
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Cast
- Andrzej SewerynZdzislaw Beksinski
- Dawid OgrodnikTomasz Beksinski
- Aleksandra KoniecznaZofia Beksinska
- Andrzej ChyraPiotr Dmochowski
- Zofia PerczyńskaStanisława Beksińska
- Magdalena BoczarskaEwa
- Agnieszka MichalskaHelena
- Jakub Wróblewski
Recommendations
- 90
The New York Times
The tragedies in this family’s life are nearly constant, but Mr. Matuszynski approaches them with a tone that’s matter-of-fact while also partaking in the particular wry irony that has been a hallmark of Polish cinema since the early 1960s. - 80
The Guardian
Thanks to inventive camerawork, mesmeric performances and incisive yet elliptical editing and storytelling, the claustrophobia becomes a feature instead of a liability. - 80
Screen Daily
Authenticity rules the day here, the contrast between the banality of daily existence and extreme conduct is the main point of the picture, all of it defined by an insistence on staying close to the actual events and refraining from any attempt at psychological observations or analytical motivations. - 80
Variety
The film is a remarkable, frequently unsettling exercise in staged voyeurism, recreating the interdependent lives of the three members of the troubled Beksiński family. - 70
Village Voice
The movie sticks in the mind not as a full-on, time-honored biopic but as a queasily warts-and-all peeling back of a family dynamic that happened to involve a figure of cultish renown. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
Like Seweryn, Konieczna is a performer with considerable experience on the Polish stage and she fulfils the same function in the film as Zofia does in the family — holding everything together with an admirably unfussy stoicism. - 38
Slant Magazine
The film tends to literalize its theme of unfulfilled desire by having characters explicitly lament their lost pasts.
