Impressive and thought provoking, this film debates the age-old topic of capital punishment. Here though, there is a difference. The morality of state-killing is critiqued alongside an analysis of individual agency - when a person kills another, apparently from a desire to murder, are there other motives and factors that bring him/her to this position? Are we all, given certain circumstances, capable of killing?
This tantalising and worrying notion has been considered elsewhere, and Camus' 'The Outsider' is a good example. Here, there are many parallels with Kieslowski's film: that a desire to kill - and killing itself - can be driven by a range of factors - some banal, some traumatic, and not all by any means within the control of the protagonist.
