Grzegorz Dębowski’s taut feature follows a Polish burglar who assumes the identity of a dead stranger’s girlfriend, with unexpectedly tender results.
What Belongs To Others opens by plunging us into the labour of two professional burglars on the margins of Polish precarity, whose day soon curdles into something life-changing. Kasia (Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska), a middle-aged woman shackled to her abusive, debt-ridden boyfriend Darek (Robert Mania), gets by pretending to scrub tenement staircases while casing the badly locked flats for cash and tech. The con runs smoothly enough until she slips out of one apartment with an uncharacteristic crisis of conscience. After Darek botches a shoplifting run and gets caught at the worst possible moment, Kasia breezes back to that flat alone, walking straight into the room where a man has hanged himself.
That wittily choreographed corpse reveal would justify Grzegorz Dębowski’s sophomore feature on its own, but its deeper pull lies in the arresting realism established from the first minutes, giving the psychological thriller its essential grip. Much of that charge comes from the productive interplay between Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska’s brilliant performance and Stanisław Horodecki’s extra-crisp cinematography, each seeming to provoke the other. The handheld camera’s immediacy, sprawling through mazes of tenement blocks and pitch-dark rural streets, finds its counterpart in the actress’s command of acute stress within a character written as shy, closed-off and thoroughly lost woman.
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Masquerading as the mysterious dead man’s last girlfriend, Kasia watches her lie take on a life of its own. Through his letters, clothes and empty fridge, she learns he was as rich as he was reclusive. It’s enough to start eyeing the flat, though the financial lure soon shades into something like morbid romantic allure. Chasing a scattered trail of addresses, she meets his mother deep in dementia, a long-estranged sister, and an ex-wife still visibly bruised by their unsuccessful marriage. From these encounters Kasia pieces together a portrait of a man undone by bad luck and bad choices, and that depressive gloom begins to hit painfully close to home, stirring a reckoning with her own compromised past. She resolves to become better, returning small instalments of what she has stolen and finally cutting ties with her nasty boyfriend, with Dębowski’s direction gradually letting its empathy for her bloom.
The film’s succession of dense dialogue scenes and wealth of real locations throw a handsome veil over its redemptive rush, even as that optimism keeps diluting the dense thriller structure it impatiently abandons. With the police already sniffing around Kasia’s fresh crimes and a criminal record on file, the script still conjures just enough luck to send her further down the rabbit hole the dead man left behind. Her unfurling finds its most moving expression in a disarmingly sincere closing monologue; a double farewell to the man who will never know what he left her and the self Kasia is finally shedding. It is an unabashedly melodramatic beat, underdeveloped for its own good, but one that neatly turns the film’s sly little equation into something akin to a life parable: a woman who made a living taking what belonged to others finally gives something back.
