“It’s like no one is living here,” Maks (Konrad Kakol) tells his mother in “Sick,” having just reached at his grandmother’s home in the Polish countryside where he is set to spend the summer along with his older sister Emma (Katarzyna Lubik), though she has yet to arrive. His grandmother (Monika Niemczyk) is on the premises, usually curled up in her bed and essentially dead to the world, though in Agata Trzebuchowska’s deeply disturbing debut feature, she can occasionally lurking in the house like a ghost with passing glimpses of her in a white satin gown skirting around in the background looking every bit like an apparition. When Maks hardly feels her presence, there also doesn’t seem to be much responsibility he has towards caring for her when it seems like a lost cause, giving way to a few idle months where he has little to do but trade flirty DMs with Oliwa, a girl he likes on Instagram and ultimately put up with Emma, a petulant firebrand who is reeling from having her burgeoning career as a tennis player derailed.
Trzebuchowska, best known as an actress for films such as “Erupcja” and “Ida,” shows an impressive eye for turning the ordinary and natural into something queasy, both scene to scene in “Sick” when there’s nothing too unusual about the aging process that Maks and Emma’s grandmother is experiencing, but the peeling of old skin and secretion of bodily fluids can be extremely gross, but overall as well when as she is entering her golden years, the siblings are in their sexual prime and unable to control their urges, facing a similar detachment of their physical and mental selves. A sense of disorientation comes through not only in the strong performances from all involved, but the swirling handheld camerawork of cinematographer Maciej Edelman, who often follows Maks closely throughout the house as he paces about, at first fidgety in his uncertainty about what to do with all his free time in an empty house and then a bit more frantic when Emma finally shows up and seems to be an agent of chaos.
It feels genuinely dangerous when Emma brandishes a knife in Maks’ direction, though she only means it playfully as she decides to entertain herself by torturing him constantly, disrupting a lunch with his only local connection Szymon (Julian Swiezewski) when she wants attention for herself and knowing at 16 her brother’s hormones are raging and teasing him about the pictures he’s sending to Oliwa. However, the line between innocent ribbing of a sibling and actual psychological warfare are obliterated when Emma appears to go a little too far in terms of toying with Maks’ testosterone levels, encouraging him to watch “Emmanuelle” while clutching his knee and suggestively rubbing sunscreen on his back. Making things even more uneasy than the potential for incest is Trzebuchowska’s decision not to pinpoint an exact cause when the brother and sister could simply be bored and horny, Emma could’ve recklessly set them on a path that neither feels they can turn back on or there may be some supernatural element pushing them closer together as their own grandmother’s spirit seems to be revived, though something still seems off about her.
This all ends in a jaw-dropping finale, though one that doesn’t feel entirely substantiated by what’s come before when the ambiguity that makes the film so tense for its first two-thirds leaves plenty of questions about what actually happened. Feeling less provocative than as if the writer/director may not have had definitive answers in the first place, the perplexing feeling that accompanies the conclusion is about the only way in which Trzebuchowska doesn’t incite some strong reaction, taking the outline for a more traditional haunted house film and reveling in finding something more creepy and rotten inside. Remarkably, she largely resists any sensationalization with the lurid subject or its gradual descent into a more overt chiller, with Maks and Emma credibly played by Kakol and Lubik as simply egging each other on as they feel uncomfortable with anyone else but one another, and while “Sick” does live up to its title by putting a pit in your stomach, Trzebuchowska shows she has a gift when it’s impossible to look away.
“Sick” will next play at the Sitges Film Fest on October 10th at Sala Tramuntana Meliá at 3 pm and October 11th at 7 pm at Cinema Escorxador.