Critics reviews

An unsettling masterpiece... It ignited the capital punishment debate in Poland (the death penalty was suspended that year). And it features, in the taxi driver’s killing, one of the most disturbing murder scenes yet filmed.

Far more than mere advocacy against the death penalty (although the film played an integral part in its abolition in Poland) it is a mournful and distressing meditation upon the act, eliding the senseless individual murder of a taxi driver with the state-sanctioned retribution dished out to his killer. A difficult and intense watch, it is vital viewing that has – and will continue to have – a deep lasting effect on those that seek it out.

One particularly brilliant aspect of A Short Film About Killing is Kieślowski’s entirely unsentimental portrayal of both victim and perpetrator. In fact, at times it seems the director is doubling over—coming up with ways to make both as prickly and unlikable as possible.

The film does not set out to explain the punkish young killer's motivation, but restricts the viewer to his tunnel vision from the start, with the edges of the picture sludged over and a lowering yellow light at the centre. The depiction of violence is far removed from the usual camera choreography, and is, in consequence, truly appalling.

An anguished, two-act take on the inseparable and diseased connection between isolated violent acts and those sanctioned by governing systems, between the murderers that hide behind institutional anonymity and those who cannot hide their face from the police.

Not for a moment does the film let us off the hook, and the atmosphere it sustains is one of the most menacing I've encountered... While it is almost impossible to conceive of Kieslowski making a bad film, in the Decalogue, and particularly in Killing, style and content were perfectly matched.

It might be called terminally Polish in its bleak handling of a brutal murder and the public execution of the murderer. It’s possibly the most powerful movie ever made about the death penalty.

"A Short Film About Killing" is a powerful rebuke to a world that pretends to deter violence through ritualized capital punishment, but dramatizes, sensationalizes and perpetuates it instead.

One of the most horrific films you're likely to see - and one of the most oddly didactic.. ["Killing" is] too short to create a real narrative, and too long to work as a formalist experiment. Caught between the impulse to tell his doomed protagonist's story on the one hand, and the cold modernist impulse to ironically juxtapose clinical portraits of two acts of death - a murder and an execution - on the other, Kieslowski ends up in no man's land.

The film is done in by its own heavy-handed foreshadowing and by the simplicity of its characters. It is possible to agree with Mr. Kieslowski's stance against capital punishment and remain unconvinced by the weak dramatic arguments he musters... The film forces the audience to confront the most vile aspects of life, without offering enough intellectual substance to justify sitting through such brutality.

A work of visionary irony... [where] murder and execution are horrifyingly indistinguishable.