Sick world première at Fantastic Fest, 18th Sept 2026
Male adolescence is a fluid mess of ejaculate, emissions and ooze. When we first see 16-year-old Maks (Konrad Kakol) in writer/director Agata Trzebuchowska’s debut feature Sick, he is also looking at himself in the mirror, and squeezes a pimple, the pus splashing messily across the glass before he wipes it off. Maks is in the toilet of a train approaching Olsztyn Głowny, on his way to the rural home of his demented grandmother (Monika Niemczyk) to tend to her needs since her carer Oksana has disappeared. This is a place where Maks spent much of his childhood, traces of which can still be found everywhere: ladder rungs nailed into the trunk of a tree, a bottle refashioned as a time capsule and filled with memorabilia, a collection of old comic books. Yet Maks is reaching the age of change – “You’ve changed a lot,” are the words with which the neighbour Szymon (Julian Świeżewski) greets Maks when the boy first arrives at his grandmother’s house. Now Maks must put away childish things and follow the imperatives of his transforming body – and the film’s title, like that of Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer (2001), is aptly formed on screen from a milky, viscous goo which foreshadows all the spit, pus, vomit, cum and other icky secretions to feature in what follows.
Maks’ grandmother is, at least at first, immobile, non-verbal and almost entirely unresponsive – although she does have a habit of interrupting her grandson’s furtive masturbation, leaving him unfulfilled and horny. The overnight arrival of Maks’ 19-year-old sister Emma (Katarzyna Łubik) is of little help, either with the grandmother’s care or with Maks’ sexual frustration, as Emma just wants to lounge around all day in her bikini and, as much out of boredom as anything else, to push her repressed little brother’s buttons and toy with his emerging emotions. “I’m in the mood for something edgy,” she tells Maks, insisting that he watch a disc of Emmanuelle (rather than his choice Shrek) and to do drugs with her, while also becoming ever more inappropriately, intrusively hands-on with him. Flirtatious Emma is at her sexual peak – something that not only Maks, but also both Szymon and his wary wife Klara (Eliza Rycembel), have certainly noticed – and desperate for attention and validation. Poor Maks, equally confused and besotted, does not quite know what has hit him.
“What’s your most shameful desire?”, Emma asks Maks, “Like something you’re embarrassed to want.” It is a key question, in a film where taboos and transgressions abound, and where Maks’ sordid fantasies come to be realised. That might be largely in Maks’ head – for Sick keeps showing us its protagonist’s dreams, and confounds them with his real life, as we see his increasingly surreal experiences repeatedly interrupted by him waking with a start from sleep, making everything smack of mere teen wish fulfilment. There are also flagrant discontinuities, with characters’ clothing or location arbitrarily altering from one scene to the next, all of which serves to undermine the reality of what we are seeing, and reducing it to Maks’ wishful thinking. Yet if much of this is a dream, then that dream is decidedly wet, reflecting Maks’ shifting adolescent psychology and physiology. Just as telling is Maks’ reply to Emma’s question: “Sometimes I wish things could be like they were before, when we were kids”. For in his pursuit of Emma, Maks is leaving behind his own relative innocence for her greater experience, and learning what she already knows: the disappointments and disillusionments of life. Maks is hurtling headlong down a road from which there can be no cumming back.
In keeping with Maks’ transition from childhood innocence to something darker, Trzebuchowska adopts the forms both of the Old Testament’s Adam and Eve narrative, and of a classic fairytale. For here we have on the one hand an Edenic paradise, an extended apple and a whole lot of rule-transgressing seduction and temptation, and on the other a woodland cottage with a lost brother and sister and a witchy grandmother. Other reference points here are as varied as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit (2015) and Emiliano Rocha Minter’s We Are The Flesh (Tenemos La Carne, 2016) – but really this forges, and follows, its own path. Deriving its title not only from the grandmother’s wavering state of health, but also from the perversion that comes to take over Maks’ errant desires, Sick is a story of a young man who all at once lusts after sexual nubility and recoils from diseased senescence, and whose rites of passage will climax in a grotesque, incestuous merger of love and death.
strap: In Agata Trzebuchowska’s wet dream of a fairytale, a young man has a perverse cumming of age in his grandmother’s woodland home
© Anton Bitel
