THE STORY – A burglar discovers a corpse in an apartment and decides to stay, investigating the dead man’s life. Uncovering his memories and secrets inspires her to envision a different future and transform her own existence.
THE CAST – Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska, Robert Mania, Ewa Pająk, Martyna Rozwadowska, Aleksandra Kolan, Jadwiga Grygierczyk & Marcin Kiszluk
THE TEAM – Grzegorz Dębowski (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 105 Minutes
It takes a peculiar kind of loneliness to fall in love with somebody you never met. Grzegorz Dębowski’s “What Belongs to Others” begins somewhere considerably less romantic. Kasia (Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska) survives by breaking into apartments alongside her domineering boyfriend, stealing whatever might provide enough money to keep them going. During one burglary, she discovers the body of a man who has taken his own life. Her boyfriend is arrested shortly afterward, leaving Kasia alone and without much direction. Rather than abandoning the apartment, she returns and gradually begins occupying the dead man’s life. By presenting herself as his girlfriend, she initially hopes to gain access to his insurance, possessions and whatever else might provide financial security. The longer she maintains the deception, however, the less important those material rewards become. What begins as another theft gradually transforms into an attempt to understand a person who can no longer tell his own story.
There is an intriguing contradiction at the center of Dębowski’s film. Kasia spends her life taking things that belong to other people, yet what she ultimately craves cannot simply be stolen. Moving through the dead man’s apartment, examining his possessions and meeting the people who knew him gives her access to an intimacy largely absent from her own existence. She becomes a strange kind of detective, except there is no murder to solve. Every object and conversation provides another fragment of someone whose absence becomes increasingly present. Kasia may initially invent their relationship to manipulate those around him, but eventually she seems to fall in love less with the man than with the story she has constructed around them and the person she can become within it.
Kwiatkowska makes that transformation compelling without attempting to make Kasia particularly likable. There is a hardness to her that feels appropriate for a life defined by instability and exploitation, and her motivations remain deliberately difficult to read. The film rarely clarifies whether an interaction is driven by genuine affection or another calculation. Kwiatkowska embraces that ambiguity, allowing subtle changes in Kasia’s behavior to reveal a vulnerability she rarely articulates. Kasia does morally questionable things throughout, but Dębowski is less interested in excusing them than understanding why this particular lie begins to mean so much to her.
The dead man develops into an unusual presence despite remaining unknowable. His belongings and the people he left behind construct an incomplete portrait of his identity while Kasia’s deception unexpectedly gives his fractured family a reason to reconnect. A lie born from greed begins producing something sincere. The woman exploiting their grief also becomes the catalyst that allows them to confront it together. Dębowski finds an affecting idea in this paradox: People can drift so far apart that something false may be required to remind them of what was once real.
“What Belongs to Others” is most successful when it allows that contradiction to remain uncomfortable rather than dividing its characters neatly between victims and perpetrators. Elements of crime dramas and subdued thrillers surround Kasia’s investigation, but Dębowski refuses to turn the premise into a conventional mystery. The question is not what happened to the dead man but who he was before it happened. Stanisław Horodecki’s cinematography remains closely attached to Kasia, observing her movements with an intimacy that occasionally resembles surveillance. Warsaw is presented with similarly little romanticism, grounding the story within a precarious existence where survival can easily take priority over ethics.
That restraint can also make “What Belongs to Others” difficult to fully connect with. Kasia is intentionally abrasive and many of the people she encounters are similarly guarded, leaving limited emotional access for characters whose loneliness drives the story. Dębowski’s refusal to sentimentalize them is admirable, but the film occasionally becomes so reserved that its emotional transformation is easier to understand intellectually than to actually feel. Kasia’s growing attachment to the dead man and his family is fascinating in theory, yet certain developments lack the emotional specificity to make that evolution entirely convincing. Housing insecurity, abusive relationships, class, grief, and materialism also surround her journey without every idea receiving enough space to develop beyond its initial suggestion.
What remains compelling is the realization that Kasia ultimately steals something far stranger than money. By inserting herself into another person’s history, she temporarily gains a family, an identity, and the possibility of being seen differently. Her lie becomes both exploitative and strangely restorative, giving people an opportunity to reconnect while allowing Kasia to imagine an existence beyond the one she has accepted. “What Belongs to Others” never entirely fulfills the promise of its excellent premise, but Kwiatkowska’s prickly performance and Dębowski’s refusal to provide easy moral answers keep its contradictions interesting. Sometimes pretending to belong somewhere can reveal just how desperately someone wants to belong anywhere.
