With this wild, modern, urban romantic crime drama, Pole Aleksandra Terpinska earned a nomination for European Discovery of the Year, and “Other People” or “Inni ludzie” is definitely a film that stands out for its originality. One could almost say that this film is a postmodernist paraphrase of a Greek tragedy moved to today’s Warsaw, narrated in a somewhat experimental style as if it were created for younger generations. It is a fast-paced film, which is influenced by the exceptional editing, which obviously follows thematically similar fast-paced movies like “Trainspotting”. Visually striking, at the same time even somewhat repulsive and equally exciting, dark, filmed through some gray filters that seem to enhance the gloomy everyday life in which the main characters find themselves.
All this is enhanced by the addition of the narrator, an Jesus-like character who brings the background of the story in hip-hop style and is always there somewhere, and just like a Greek chorus, he seems to express the inner anger and frustrations of the protagonist. At the center of the story is Kamil (Jacek Beler), a young man in his late twenties who lives in one of those typical socialist skyscrapers with his alcoholic mother and younger sister. He’s a petty criminal, a bum with a traumatic past who still hopes to finally make a record and become a hip-hop star. Quite by chance, he will get involved with Iwona (Sonia Bohosiewicz), a rich, lonely trophy wife whom her husband does not see anymore, and she is sure that he has a lover and she is not wrong.
After Iwona hires Kamil for some repairs, their relationship will start, and at the same time he is in a relationship with Aneta (Magdalena Kolesnik in the role of a very similar influencer from the film of the same name), a young beauty who works in a perfumery and who is forever hanging on social networks and possessed is by her appearance, but deep down she is unhappy. And she is not the only one deeply unhappy. All the characters are unhappy and dissatisfied, really angry, bitter and frustrated. Their lives are chaotic, and behind all that postmodernist exciting and wild facade, there is actually a dark social drama that is also a not at all subtle criticism of today’s late capitalist and consumerist society.
Societies for whose individuals it is crucial what impression they leave and what the illusions of their lives look like on social networks. It is important for them that others think they are happy, satisfied and successful, and the fact that in reality the situation is completely different is actually less important. It’s a dark and grotesque hip-hop ballad that may be a little harder to follow at first until you get used to that unusual, interesting, wild style that is beneath the surface a brutal critique of a crumbling society. We realize at the end that all the characters here are actually repulsive, almost caricatures, and it is a film with great ambitions whose ideas are mostly well articulated and presented.