This Is Not Happening (To się nie dzieje) had its international première at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, 17 Nov 2025
“I’ve handled things like this before, Tytus,” says Bartek Drzewiecji (Tomasz Schuchardt) on the phone to his colleague (voiced by Dariusz Maj) near the beginning of Artur Wyrzykowski’s This Is Not Happening (To się nie dzieje), “I can see the board, I see the power play.” Bartek is a fixer, managing crises for politicians and celebrities, and as his language implies, he regards what he does as a game of power and control, in which he is the master player with all the moves. Yet on this ordinary evening in Wrocław, he is having to handle a situation that comes much closer to home, and for which there may be no easy way out.
Bartek’s estranged teenage son Daniel (Borys Otawa) has arrived at the apartment of Bartek’s fiançée Maja (Paulina Gałązka). There has been an incident at Daniel’s school, leaving several other boys injured and one dead, and both Daniel’s clothes, and the knife that he is carrying, are covered in blood. The details are not clear, but Bartek decides then and there that he will do anything to help his son evade jail, and begins to formulate an escape plan. With both his ex-wife Zuza (Monika Dawidziuk) and a determined policewoman (Anna Mrozowska) constantly calling and closing in, Bartek is both in his element, and rapidly losing his much-vaunted control over the chaos which he insists is always caused not by strategy but by ‘people’. The problem is that Bartek is himself a person, and every aspect of his dysfunctional personality – the addictions, the compulsions, the casual deceits, the need to feel centred and the patriarchal bullying – will all come as pieces on the playing board over this one long, dark evening of the soul. For even as Bartek, having failed the first time round to be a good father, is desperate for a second chance, Daniel turns out not to have fallen too far from the tree.
Named for Bartek’s strong sense of denial, This Is Not Happening confines itself to Maja’s apartment (undergoing refurbishment in reflection of her hopes and dreams for a new life with Bartek), and unfolds in near real time, all of which adds to both its immense tension and suffocating claustrophobia. Wyrzykowski’s script carefully parcels out information to ensure that every line counts in building the bigger picture for this explosive scenario, while DP Ernest Wilczynski often shoots Bartek out of focus or oversaturated with light to reflect the rapid unravelling of his self-image, and Teoniki Rożynek’s discordant soundtrack underscores the notion that this is a man out of tune with his own identity.
“It’s too late,” says Bartek, twice, near the end of the film, and those words summarise all too well his predicament. For in trying, belatedly, to make amends for past mistakes, Bartek is capable only of more mistakes, and turning an already terrible situation – in part of his own making – into a much worse one. So this is a thriller, but also a tragedy, with escalating dilemmas to fuel its tightly wound pace, with compounding lies to confound its morality, and with hubristic masculinity at its dark heart. For here errant fatherhood is fragile, and can bring the whole house down.
strap: Artur Wyrzykowski’s feature debut is a tense, taut tragedy in which a flawed patriarch’s problems come home to roost
© Anton Bitel
