Ostatnia rodzina

Home is where the art is in OSTATNIA RODZINA, a dutiful and respectful chronicle of the last 28 years in the life of Poland’s foremost apocalyptic surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński. Also giving considerable prominence to the travails of his long-suffering wife Zofia and their livewire son Tomasz, it’s a claustrophobic and slightly airless affair mostly set in the troubled trio’s Warsaw high-rise apartment. The self-taught artist’s stygian bizarreries – as well as painting, he did sculpture and worked in photography – at their best summon echoes of francis Bacon, Caspar David friedrich, h.R. Giger, Rene Magritte and prog-rock album-cover visionary Roger Dean. But Matuszyński and his cinematographer Kacper fertacz resist any attempt to match Beksiński’s trademark phantasmagoric visual style, favoring detachedly observational widescreen compositions which convey the interior spaces of the family’s living environment with steely, dunnish verisimilitude. Although time-stamps are frequently deployed, proceedings unfold in a kind of bubble, hermetically and somewhat distractingly isolated from the wider world’s turbulence. (Neil Young)