Man enters room, stabs sleeping man, walks out. The end.
Roman Polanski devotes no more than one sentence to this short in his autobiography, & refers to it as a "preliminary exercise".
That's all it really is, just a simple exercise with a camera, & a grand total of two edits, not counting the titles (which, I suspect, were added years later).
However, it has an eerie quality about it not usually found in simple film-school exercises. The murder itself is committed in such a matter-of-fact fashion that it has an almost documentary sense of realism about it. It's not done with waving arms, bizarre camera angles or splashing blood - it's done with a pocketknife, positioned above a man's chest & pushed firmly downwards. Can't say I've ever seen a murder done like that on film before, & that's what's so nasty about it - it's so bland it feels as if it must be real.
The lack of any soundtrack just makes this minor entry in Polanski's filmography seem even creepier. A disturbing hint of things to come.
Roman Polanski devotes no more than one sentence to this short in his autobiography, & refers to it as a "preliminary exercise".
That's all it really is, just a simple exercise with a camera, & a grand total of two edits, not counting the titles (which, I suspect, were added years later).
However, it has an eerie quality about it not usually found in simple film-school exercises. The murder itself is committed in such a matter-of-fact fashion that it has an almost documentary sense of realism about it. It's not done with waving arms, bizarre camera angles or splashing blood - it's done with a pocketknife, positioned above a man's chest & pushed firmly downwards. Can't say I've ever seen a murder done like that on film before, & that's what's so nasty about it - it's so bland it feels as if it must be real.
The lack of any soundtrack just makes this minor entry in Polanski's filmography seem even creepier. A disturbing hint of things to come.