Mug

Direc­tor Mał­gorza­ta Szu­mows­ka doesn’t hold her home nation in par­tic­u­lar­ly high regard. The Pol­ish coun­try­side she presents in Mug is a slate of mut­ed greys and greens, home to big­ot­ed vil­lage folk, per­vert­ed priests and a sin­gle black sheep. The lat­ter is our pro­tag­o­nist, Jacek, a long-haired met­al­head chug­ging along the land­scape in a ram­shackle car. He is an out­cast from his small-mind­ed fam­i­ly, he’s urged by his tough lovin’ sis­ter to leave town as soon as pos­si­ble. He doesn’t listen.

Instead, after a head­first tum­ble into his workplace’s hulk­ing stat­ue of Jesus, and sub­se­quent face trans­plant, he’s reduced to the media’s play­thing and his family’s ele­phant man in the room. Yet not enough has changed for his injury to seem fun­da­men­tal to the nar­ra­tive. He’s still a mis­fit, and Mug is still filmed with a tilt-shift effect, reduc­ing half the frame to a dis­tract­ing out-of-focus lick. The only new obsta­cle Jacek is forced to con­tend with is his free-spir­it­ed fiancée, who refus­es to look him in the eye (just the one; the oth­er is smushed shut).

Jacek’s redemp­tion arc is ten­der and com­pas­sion­ate, Mateusz Koś­ciukiewicz more con­vinc­ing as for­lorn wan­der­er than gurn­ing met­al­head. But smacked across it is a crip­pling­ly broad series of jabs at the town’s Chris­t­ian pop­u­la­tion: the hyp­o­crit­i­cal lack of empa­thy; the stran­gle­hold of cap­i­tal­ism; the mis­use of church tax; the X‑rated day­dreams of priests, you name it. Oth­er moments have no place at all: an exor­cism scene that tries to milk the melan­cholic from the mad is squan­dered when played for laughs, and a corpse utters an exple­tive in a moment of jar­ring surrealism.

Mug’s over­bear­ing state­ment of intent is epit­o­mised by its over­bear­ing stat­ue. This devout com­mu­ni­ty don’t have their heads screwed on prop­er­ly. But nation­al dis­dain has cloud­ed judge­ment, and so both direc­tor and com­mu­ni­ty have let their con­struc­tions get out of hand.