Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1989) is a profound, ten-part exploration of human nature, morality, and the gap between divine law and human frailty. Each episode, inspired by the Ten Commandments, captures ordinary people in extraordinary moral dilemmas, highlighting the tension between ideals and instincts. Kieślowski’s minimalist, documentary-style approach strips away embellishment, exposing the raw, often bleak reality of existence. The series reflects the irony, contradictions, and emotional struggles of life, offering a quiet yet powerful meditation on the limits of free will, faith, and conscience. With its timeless relevance, Dekalog challenges viewers to confront their own nature and the weight of moral choices.
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Dekalog (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1989)
Remember to keep the feast days holy, and that there are nine other commandments. Right after that, remember there’s another decalogue, filmed in 1989, with each law taking less than an hour. If you watch it in the days leading up to the feast you want to sanctify, you’ll experience the art of opposition, contrast, resistance, and denial. And it’s the only way to scratch the surface of cinema with your nails, as cinema itself slips into life.
Kieślowski’s Dekalog is “the thing that doesn’t fit,” yet says everything. It’s cinema that, more than any other today, manages to show—more with humility than provocation—the gap between the ideal and the human, between divine commandments and the human condition. As women and men carry out minimal yet extraordinary, ordinary yet abnormal actions, the director grips a timid camera in one hand and a microphone in the other. But neither of these tools shows any compassion for these women and men; they frame and follow them with impartiality and without mercy. The nakedness of existence, viewed through the renunciation of moral lessons, is the third dimension of K.K.’s cinema.
The Dekalog deserves ten reviews, one for each commandment, one for each curse lurking beneath every human instinct. But before continuing, we should ask whether divine decrees and the corresponding sins are episodes or installments, laws or manifestos of anarchy. While some argue that man is God’s spectacle, Kieślowski turns God into a puppet, His word into a broken script. He writes a grave, silent poem—a counter-decalogue—illustrated quietly, while much of the cinema of the 1980s was frivolously floundering in the feathered pillows of that century’s baroque excess.
The Dekalog takes the weight of divine commandments and drops it on its characters like a slab of marble falling on helmetless passersby beneath the unsafe scaffolding of life—a life that we bipeds, cursed with that congenital virus called conscience, are destined to endure. God’s word slides into earthly misfortune, including that of children who seem only slightly less unfortunate than Christ on the cross.
In my opinion, the series should be watched consecutively, one commandment per day. To fully enter the secular dream of the director and especially his screenwriter, Piesiewicz, you need to immerse yourself in frozen lakes, cold wooden houses, snowfalls on a lonely Christmas Eve night, and cars waiting at traffic lights like robots waiting for other robots. The snow-covered streets of Warsaw are the bottom of the barrel, a perfectly coherent and inhospitable environment.
Our good fortune is that we can see beyond this context the work of someone who started his career as a documentary filmmaker: the impartiality honed through this experience is applied—and evident—in every scene. Everything is stripped of embellishment, theatricality, and elaborate set design.
The Dekalog is filmed from life, as the conduct of the people who inspired the Christian commandments was meant to be. In my opinion, the two most unforgettable episodes are Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, which I just rewatched and am thinking about now, and Honor your father and mother. Each is a sweet yet poisoned dagger, fifty-five minutes long, that makes your heart jolt, soar, and forget about the money keeping contemporary cinema in a medically induced coma. These episodes powerfully remind us of the permanence of the law—eternal because it is impossible to apply, unsuited to those who must obey it.
Kieślowski places the sacredness of Christmas choirs and the urgency of illicit love in the same film, making them appear in opposition. But with a hint of irony (Polish irony, mind you, so let’s not get our hopes up) and complicity that finally lets us breathe again.
Pretend you haven’t read these lines and watch it without expectations. What horror, those “expectations”! Expectations insist on standing ahead of us in the queue for happiness. Let them wait instead. Let them fall behind and wait in vain. Meanwhile, the Dekalog only becomes more modern, more relevant, and more forward-looking with age. The further the meanings drift from orthodoxy, the closer God comes, curious. He raises His eyebrows and pretends not to care. But He watches the big screen, taking in all ten commandments with an expression somewhere between fascination and surprise, amazed that they’ve turned into a frozen, silent, and unstoppable hell. And maybe He’s even a little envious, a little satisfied, seeing that after thousands of years (or perhaps an eternity ahead), instinct still prevails over dogma.
Venceslav Soroczynski
