Sick

Sick

A taboo-breaking, shocking, and beautiful coming-of-age horror

Maks and his sister Emma, a few years older than him, travel to the Masurian Lake District to look after their sick, bedridden grandmother. Isolated and abandoned by their parents, they are forced to grow up at an accelerated pace. What begins with arguments over who should wash the sick woman gradually turns into psychological games, and an erotic, dangerous tension begins to grow between them. Meanwhile, something is terribly wrong with their grandmother. Her skin is peeling off in sheets, and one day she seems completely absent, only to look and speak the next as if nothing were wrong. Maks and Emma try to find their bearings amid this madness, unaware that they are spending their final summer before entering adulthood.

“Sick” is a bold film that pushes boundaries and tackles a taboo subject, but does so with grace and sensitivity. It begins as a story about the end of innocence, only to gradually transform into something far more powerful and unsettling. It has the atmosphere of a summer memory, like a slightly blurred image recorded on a VHS tape, but beneath that nostalgic surface lurks a genuine horror, which actor Agata Trzebuchowska, making her directorial debut, reveals with remarkable precision. This is a film about the awakening of sexuality, raging hormones, and the unease that comes with discovering one’s own body and desires: poetic and beautiful, yet repeatedly disrupting that beauty with something dirty, rotten, and disturbing.

Agata Trzebuchowska, best known as the star of Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Ida”, cast Konrad Kąkol, Katarzyna Łubik, and Monika Niemczyk in the leading roles of her directorial debut, with Eliza Rycembel and Julian Świeżewski appearing in supporting roles. “Sick” demonstrates that Trzebuchowska has just as distinctive a voice behind the camera as she once did in front of it.