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Most horror movies hand you a flashlight. Sick hands you a damp towel and leaves the room.
Agata Trzebuchowska’s feature debut has no character whose reactions you can borrow. Nobody says out loud what the audience is thinking. The camera never flinches, so you have to do all the flinching yourself. The problem is that you’re never quite sure what you’re flinching at.
I spent most of its 90 minutes feeling several things at once and none of them cleanly. Pity. Revulsion. Fear. Something uncomfortably close to tenderness. The title isn’t a metaphor. Nearly every stretch of this film holds something most people would find sickening. What makes it so hard to shake is that Trzebuchowska never tells you which of those things should sicken you most.
A summer nobody asked for
Sixteen-year-old Maks (Konrad Kąkol) and his older sister Emma (Katarzyna Łubik) are sent to the Polish countryside to care for their ailing grandmother (Monika Niemczyk). It’s the house from Maks’s childhood memories of lake days and forest trails. Now it’s decrepit and airless, and the summer heat sits on everything like a wet blanket.
Maks reads comics and fights a losing war with his own skin. Emma drinks, sunbathes and reapplies sunscreen like it’s a part-time job. Gran is bedridden with an illness nobody explains.
Then the siblings’ bond starts to shift. The film’s own synopsis calls it “something unsettling and difficult to define,” and that’s accurate. Looks hold a beat too long. Teasing picks up a second meaning. Trzebuchowska doesn’t stage any of it as a twist or a confession. It just arrives the way the heat arrives, slowly and then everywhere.
There’s no adult who walks in and names it. No scene steps outside the siblings to sound an alarm. Some viewers will read that as the film approving. I don’t think it is. It’s the film declining to editorialize, and those are different things even when they feel identical in a dark theater.
Two sicknesses under one roof
Sick runs on more than one kind of fear, and it never lets them settle into a hierarchy.
The first is the grandmother. Early on, Trzebuchowska keeps her face swallowed in shadow, and Niemczyk does a frightening amount with an uneasy smile. As her condition changes, the body horror arrives. Skin comes away in sheets. She leaves a thick residue behind her. It’s the oldest fear in the genre made very literal: the body you love turning into something you don’t recognize.
The second is the siblings’ own bodies. This is an aggressively wet movie. Sweat, sunscreen, popped pimples, sticky surfaces. Adolescence here isn’t a glow. It’s a leak. And by framing the teenagers’ bodies with the same queasy attention as the grandmother’s, the film quietly refuses to let youth stand in for innocence or age stand in for monstrosity.
The third fear is the one with no makeup effects at all. It’s what’s happening between Maks and Emma, and the dread of not knowing how far it goes or who’s steering it.
The tension comes from the collision. Every instinct you have as a horror fan tells you to watch the thing in the bed. The film keeps pulling your eyes back down the hallway. Without spoiling the late turns, Sick eventually commits harder to its supernatural thread and builds to a finale that is loud where the rest of the film is close and humid. Some viewers will experience that as relief. Finally, a monster. I’m not convinced it works that way. The new threat doesn’t cancel the old ones. It just stacks on top of them.
Sitting with it
So does the refusal work?
Mostly yes, and the cost is real. A film that won’t give you emotional handrails is going to lose people. Some will find it alienating. Some will call it shock for shock’s sake. I understand that reaction, but the shocks in Sick aren’t punchlines. Nobody’s winking. The disgust is load-bearing. It’s what the movie uses to keep you from sorting your feelings into neat piles.
That takes nerve from anyone. From a first-time writer-director it’s remarkable. Trzebuchowska is best known for starring in Ida, and she has chosen to step behind the camera with a film that doesn’t explain itself, doesn’t apologize and doesn’t offer a single character as a safe place to stand. She trusts the audience to feel more than one thing at once and to leave without a resolution. I respect that a great deal more than I enjoyed every minute of it, and I suspect that’s the correct ratio for this movie.
Some images stay unresolved. Some relationships stay murky. I’m not going to pretend I cracked them, because the film doesn’t pretend either.
Sick’s most disturbing trick is the one you notice after the lights come up. The thing in the bed was never the only thing you couldn’t look away from. You just never figured out which one was holding you there.