A con­tro­ver­sial new film con­fronts the hor­rors of child abduction

Play­ground shows, and nev­er tells. Pol­ish direc­tor Bar­tosz M Kowalski’s film is dif­fi­cult to dis­cuss as a whole with­out begin­ning at its end: the inex­plic­a­ble, unspeak­ably graph­ic mur­der of a young child, caught by a pas­sive cam­era you’ll wish wasn’t so cal­lous­ly unflinch­ing. It’s a scene so appalling and so grue­some that it prompt­ed unprece­dent­ed walk­outs at the film’s recent San Sebas­t­ian Film Fes­ti­val screen­ing. Those unwit­ting onlook­ers who remained were forced to rad­i­cal­ly revise every­thing that has come before. How exact­ly did we arrive here – at a cul­mi­na­tion of events that offers no con­clu­sion? And does the film have any­thing to offer besides shock value?

End­ing as a night­mar­ish account of juve­nile delin­quen­cy and psy­chopathol­o­gy, Play­ground intro­duces its char­ac­ters – 12 year-old class­mates in a small Pol­ish town – over the course of three ded­i­cat­ed vignettes. Gabrysia (Michali­na Świstuń) applies lip­stick, fas­tens a bow to her dress, before being dri­ven to her grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mo­ny. Her school day has only just begun when the sto­ry resets itself, return­ing to an ear­li­er time to fol­low anoth­er per­spec­tive. Gabrysia’s sto­ry is inter­rupt­ed by Szymek (Nico­las Przy­go­da), whose ear­ly morn­ing rou­tine involves car­ing for his dis­abled father. Final­ly, we meet the even more dis­ad­van­taged Czarek (Prze­mek Baliński), who is made to shave his head before sit­ting for a class photo.

All three char­ac­ters and their respec­tive back­sto­ries seem poised to con­verge on the lev­el­ling play­ground. There the film steadi­ly switch­es from an innocu­ous sce­nario – teens smok­ing cig­a­rettes, ignor­ing phone calls from their par­ents – to a severe one, where Szymek and Czarek’s teas­ing of ani­mals or bul­ly­ing of Gabrysia is no longer the kind of behav­iour we might have ini­tial­ly dis­missed as benign. At some sur­re­al thresh­old between the close of the school year and start of the sum­mer break, Szymek and Czarek are then seen loi­ter­ing around a shop­ping cen­tre, where they abduct a young infant (UK view­ers will recog­nise dis­tress­ing par­al­lels with the mur­der of James Bulger).

The film’s light­ning-rod, feel-bad final scene plays out in an extend­ed, sta­t­ic long shot. It’s a styl­is­tic choice that demon­strates in minia­ture Kowalski’s over­ar­ch­ing focus: recon­struct­ing a crime and none of its after­math. Play­ground asks a lot of the audi­ence, not only our will­ing­ness to endure a hor­rif­ic mur­der but to look else­where for mean­ing – to active­ly revise, plot, and piece togeth­er what we have wit­nessed. It’s a dif­fi­cult chal­lenge but one ful­ly worth accept­ing from a film­mak­er who asks us to con­sid­er what hap­pens when a cam­era stops rolling.