The Strange Weight of Belonging

MOVIE REVIEWS
What Belongs to Others (Cudze Rzeczy)
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Genre: Drama, Crime
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 45m
Director: Grzegorz Dębowski
Writer: Grzegorz Dębowski
Cast: Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska, Robert Mania, Ewa Pająk, Martyna Rozwadowska, Aleksandra Kolan, Jadwiga Grygierczyk, Marcin Kiszluk
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: Other people’s homes tell Kasia things that their owners never intended to share. She makes her living breaking into apartments, entering spaces where photographs, furniture, bills, medicine, half-finished meals, and belongings reveal pieces of lives she has no right to know about. WHAT BELONGS TO OTHERS takes that violation of privacy and turns it in an unexpected direction, asking whether stepping into someone else’s life can make a person recognize what is missing from their own.

Writer/director Grzegorz Dębowski begins with the architecture of a crime story. Kasia and her boyfriend Darek survive life by burglarizing apartments, and one break-in leaves her standing beside the body of a man who died alone. Darek gets arrested, leaving Kasia without the partner who has helped define both her work and her limited sense of stability. Rather than running from what happened, she returns to the dead man’s apartment and eventually begins presenting herself as a part of his life.

Her motives don’t start noble, which is one of the only real choices that Dębowski can make. Kasia sees an opportunity to take their money, possessions, and potentially income that belonged to someone who can’t stop her. Monika Sabina Kwiatkowska doesn’t ask us to overlook that because the film eventually develops sympathy for Kasia. She plays someone accustomed to getting through life by taking what she can, and that instinct doesn’t disappear because the story has placed her in unusual circumstances.

The apartment gradually changes meaning because Kasia starts paying attention. Objects stop being things worth stealing and become evidence. Names begin to connect to relationships, belongings reveal routines, and a man she never met slowly becomes more complicated than the anonymous body she discovered. WHAT BELONGS TO OTHERS never turns him into a ghost because his absence does enough. He exists through the space created by his death and through the people who carried different versions of him with them.

That gives the film an unusual depth. Kasia isn’t trying to solve a murder or uncover some enormous buried secret; she’s trying to understand how someone could have an entire life and still end up dead in an apartment without anyone noticing. Every discovery adds another piece without really providing an answer. The more she learns, the stranger it becomes that these people could once have been connected and now know so little about one another.

Dębowski uses apartments as extensions of that loneliness. Kasia moves through spaces that belong to people who live in close physical proximity to others yet remain isolated, and the repetition never makes the homes interchangeable. The burglary element creates an odd intimacy because Kasia often knows something about these people before they offer her anything.

Stanisław Horodecki’s cinematography keeps that intimacy from becoming too emotional. The film has the texture of something observed rather than arranged, even as the premise becomes increasingly unlikely. Long takes allow conversations and small movements to breathe without reminding us that a camera is guiding our attention. That also benefits Kwiatkowska, whose performance depends more on gradual changes in behavior than declarations about who Kasia is becoming.

Kasia’s deception becomes more interesting once money isn’t the only purpose. She begins forming connections under pretenses, leaving the movie with a moral problem it never needs to solve. A lie remains a lie even when it produces tenderness. Stealing remains stealing, even when the thief ends up paying closer attention to someone than to the people who supposedly belonged in that person’s life. That contradiction gives WHAT BELONGS TO OTHERS its personality. Kasia does harmful things and can also show unexpected kindness, while people who appear respectable can be careless, distant, or cruel without becoming villains. The film keeps returning to the possibility that human connection doesn’t always arrive through admirable behavior.

Ewa Pająk, Martyna Rozwadowska, Jadwiga Grygierczyk, and the rest of the supporting cast gradually expand the story beyond Kasia’s unusual relationship with a dead stranger. Each new connection changes what she thinks she knows about him and exposes another separation within the larger family. The film’s strength comes from allowing those fractures to remain recognizable. Families rarely break apart because of one dramatic event; sometimes distance accumulates until people realize they no longer know how to reach one another.

Its hopeful side is intentionally strange because there’s no moral route toward it. Kasia does something wrong, keeps doing it, and somehow creates circumstances in which people begin to see one another differently. That doesn’t mean the film endorses manipulation. It’s more interested in how desperate humans can become for connection and how surprisingly little may be required to interrupt years of silence.

Loneliness here isn’t treated like a poetic condition reserved for especially wounded people. It’s mundane. Someone lives alone, another relationship falls apart, relatives stop calling, conversations get postponed, and eventually distance becomes normal enough that nobody questions it. The film understands how frightening that normality can be without needing to exaggerate it.

Kwiatkowska keeps Kasia from becoming just a symbol for all of this. There’s a toughness in her, along with suspicion and a survival instinct that often makes affection look dangerous. Her gradual curiosity about another person’s life never transforms her into someone different. What changes is her sense that another kind of existence might actually be available to her. That possibility is more important than some dramatic moral awakening. Kasia has been surviving within this life that taught her to take first and worry about consequences later. Living inside someone else’s identity exposes her to relationships, routines, and forms of belonging she may never have imagined as realistic options for herself.

WHAT BELONGS TO OTHERS eventually turns the language of theft inside out. Kasia begins by taking objects from strangers and later begins borrowing memories, relationships, and even a place inside somebody else’s family history. None of those things truly belong to her. The remarkable part is that pretending they do forces her to consider what she might actually want to claim for herself.

Dębowski finds hope without pretending loneliness disappears once people finally speak to each other. Years of separation aren’t repaired by one conversation, and Kasia’s actions don’t become okay because something good grows out of them. The film understands that a moment of genuine connection can matter even when it doesn’t permanently fix anyone.

That modesty is what makes WHAT BELONGS TO OTHERS work. It starts with a woman entering homes to take what isn’t hers and gradually reveals someone who’s never felt that much of anything belonged to her in the first place. By stepping into a dead man’s absence, Kasia doesn’t find a replacement life waiting to be claimed. She finds enough evidence that another one might be possible.

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[photo courtesy of BLUE ONION, MAZOWIECKI I WARSZAWSKI FUNDUSZ FILMOWY, KOI STUDIO, COLOR PRO, UCHO STUDIO]

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