this is mr bugajski's first and only masterpiece a depressive study of an official machine of torture in the stalinist poland and of a stunning will to live of an individual

excellent dark and anxious photography and impressive acting with cannes best actress award winner krystyna janda and underestimated great polish characteristic actor janusz gajos

i've seen it in a small dilapidated post-socialist cinema in my city in the early nineties and it was running as a loud blockbuster here in poland at that time-it was advertised as a 'shelf movie' ('polkownik':)as it was banned for several years in the eighties when poland was ruled by a soviet-backed military junta

i can honestly recommend it-it's a piece of the first-class cinema

Unlike the reviewer "carioca-6," I have never seen this film available in the U.S. for rent or sale in any video format. It is not available from Netflix as of early 2008. I have seen it only once, when I lived in Detroit. Living near the border, I could pick up some Canadian stations, and "The Interrogation" was shown probably in late 1991 on the old TVOntario series "Film International" hosted by Jay Scott. Nevertheless, so riveting was this film that I have never forgotten it. Within the first couple of minutes, the film establishes that Tonia is a young pretty blonde---she is a wife and mother but doesn't seem to take this role too seriously--who is apolitical (risky in Communist Poland) and mostly out to have a good time. Without warning or reason, the film plunges her into a Kafkaesque nightmare of arrest, interrogation, conviction and imprisonment. She loses her youth, her health, everything but her own inner resources, and as the outside world forgets her, she develops dignity and a will to survive. Still worth seeing, despite the collapse of the government under which it was made, as a character portrait and a study of man's inhumanity to (wo)man. There are places on Earth where this still goes on, and they are not so far away as we'd like to think.

Occasionally a film about which you know nothing comes along and knocks you down. This is even more remarkable when it is 30 years old. It is what in Poland they call a polkownik or 'shelf movie', that is to say a film that was so explosive it had to be put on a shelf and not shown. Bugajski made Interrogation/Przesluchanie in Poland in 1982 and finished principal photography a week before martial law was declared. He then buried the film, literally, in order to keep it from being destroyed. With the end of Polish Communism it resurfaced in 1989, being premiered in the UK in 1990, and was the official Polish entry at Cannes in 1990. The story is compelling: in 1951 a young woman, Tonia Dziwisz, is arrested when she is drunk, and thrown into prison where the UBeks, a major and Lieutenant Morawski, try to force her to spill the beans on Olcha, a war resistance hero she had slept with, in a way that would condemn him to death, regardless of whether what she said was true or false. But it is not just the story that compels, but the way it is made. Much of it is in close-up, a style I am normally wary of, but Bugajski uses it to convey the visceral nature of mental and physical torture. There are some medium shots in the film, and towards the end a long shot is used to convey how distant the outside world has become. But mostly we see the faces of both victims and torturers wrestling with inner demons. Is it true? Yes. It starts in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon territory, and develops into a cat-and-mouse psychological thriller. I think fiction takes over here, but it only shows how fiction is more powerful and more true than fact. I never have nightmares, but this film gave me one. Highly recommended.