Most films show you what happens. Through and Through spends ninety percent of its energy showing you what happens just outside the edge of the frame, in the space where you cannot quite see, and asks you to feel the violence by its shadow rather than watch it directly. That single formal decision tells you almost everything about Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s astonishing 1973 debut, a Polish film so radical in its construction that audiences at the time reportedly wrote obscenities in the cinema comment book and, in a few cases, spat.
It is also, and this matters, based on a true story: the case of Jan and Maria Malisz, an impoverished couple who murdered their way toward a few days of borrowed dignity in Depression-era Kraków and were hanged for it. Królikiewicz took that lurid true-crime material and did the opposite of what a true-crime film usually does. He refused to sensationalize, refused to explain, and built instead a punishing, hypnotic, formally berserk study of poverty as a kind of slow violence that eventually finds a target. Radiance Films has now rescued this near-impossible-to-see landmark with its worldwide Blu-ray premiere, and the result is essential, difficult, and not remotely for everyone.
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Through and Through is a formally radical Polish masterwork about a poor couple driven to murder, based on a real 1933 case, and it is one of the boldest debuts in Eastern European cinema. Radiance’s 2K restoration finally makes a long-buried film properly available, backed by three of the director’s short films and a strong booklet. It is a genuine landmark and a genuinely tough watch, and the Through and Through Blu-ray is the definitive way to meet it.
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- What it is: a poverty-stricken 1930s Kraków couple descends into murder, told through radically experimental technique
- Based on: the true 1933 crime of Jan and Maria Malisz
- The restoration: worldwide Blu-ray premiere, new 2K restoration supervised by the film’s own cinematographer
- The edition: limited to 2,000 copies, region-free, in a Scanavo case with a removable OBI strip, plus three bonus short films and a booklet
- Best for: adventurous cinephiles, students of experimental film, and admirers of the Polish golden age
- The score: 86 out of 100
The Through and Through Blu-ray is, in short, a major act of preservation wrapped around one of the most uncompromising films you will see this year, and that combination is exactly why it deserves your attention.
Two People, One Doom
Jan Malisz, played by Franciszek Trzeciak, is a young man with thinning hair and soft, rounded features who wants to be an architect and cannot manage to be much of anything. He is an illustrator by training, but the work does not come, and the checks do not come, and the 1930s Kraków he lives in has no particular use for him. Into this life walks Maria, played by Anna Nieborowska, all severe bangs and sharp angles, a woman as hard-edged as Jan is soft. They meet, they marry, and they begin the long slow slide that the film has already told us, in its opening minutes, ends with both of them destroyed.
What binds them is poverty and something stranger than poverty: a mutual, escalating sense of humiliation that curdles into a shared conviction that the world owes them one moment of grandeur. His family disapproves of her. Work evaporates. They drift from one indignity to the next, and somewhere in that drift the idea forms that they might simply take what the world has refused to give them. The plan, when it arrives, is pathetic and grand at once, a scheme to rob a mail carrier of a pension delivery using a forged money order, and like every plan these two make, it goes wrong in the ugliest possible way.
By the end, three people are dead, including the elderly couple in whose rented room the crime plays out, and Jan and Maria are on trial for their lives. But Through and Through is not interested in the mechanics of the crime or the suspense of the courtroom in any conventional sense. It is interested in the two of them, in the specific texture of their degradation, and in the terrible, almost transcendent way that committing an atrocity makes these two nobodies feel, for the first time, like somebody. You can find the full cast and credits on the film’s IMDb page, but no credits list prepares you for the experience of actually watching it.
A True Crime Turned Inside Out
The most radical thing about Through and Through is what it refuses to do with its own sensational source material.
The real Malisz case was a genuine scandal in 1930s Poland, the kind of lurid double life that sells newspapers: a desperate couple, a botched robbery, a triple murder, a sensational trial, a public execution. Królikiewicz drew on archival research and a published account of the trial to reconstruct it, and a lesser filmmaker would have made exactly the film you are imagining, a grim procedural with a body count and a moral. Królikiewicz made something almost aggressively opposite. He strips out the suspense, the whodunit, the tidy causation, and refuses to let the crime become entertainment. What remains is not the story of what the Maliszes did but an excavation of why people in their position break, and of what breaking actually feels like from the inside.
This is where the film reveals its real subject, which is poverty itself, rendered not as social-realist misery but as a kind of ambient violence pressing on the characters from every direction. Long before anyone is killed, Through and Through is already a film full of violence, the daily grinding violence of humiliation and exclusion and the slow theft of a person’s dignity. When the murders finally come, they arrive less as a plot event than as the inevitable discharge of everything that has been building, the moment the pressure finds a way out. The film’s most unsettling idea, delivered with total conviction, is that for Jan and Maria the killing is not a fall but an elevation. Having been nothing their whole lives, they become, in the act of atrocity, briefly and horribly significant. The film neither condemns nor excuses this. It simply makes you feel it, which is far more disturbing than any judgment would be.
That refusal to moralize is the film’s ethical core and its greatest provocation. Through and Through hands you two murderers and dares you to recognize something human in them, not to forgive them but to understand the machinery that produced them. In 1973 Poland, that was an incendiary thing to do, and it remains bracing now.
Everything Happens Just Off-Screen
Now for the reason Through and Through is spoken of as a landmark rather than merely a good film, and it is entirely a matter of form.
Królikiewicz began as a documentarian, and his debut fiction feature weaponizes documentary’s tools against documentary’s usual purposes. The defining technique here is his radical use of off-frame space. Again and again, the most important action in a scene happens outside the edges of the image, just beyond what the camera will show you, so that you are constantly straining to see something the film deliberately withholds. Sound arrives from spaces you cannot locate. Bodies move through frames that refuse to contain them. The effect is genuinely disorienting, a constant low-grade anxiety produced by the simple, ruthless decision to point the camera slightly wrong on purpose.
The sound design is Through and Through’s other great weapon, and its reputation is entirely deserved. Through and Through builds an oppressive, almost rhythmic wall of noise, layering diegetic sound into something closer to an assault than a soundtrack, and for long stretches it withholds conventional dialogue almost entirely, letting objects and images and raw emotion carry the meaning instead. Only in the courtroom sequence does language reassert itself, and when it does, when Jan and Maria finally speak directly and even address the audience, the effect lands like a door being kicked open after an hour of suffocation.
I want to be precise about the nature of the difficulty here, because it is often misdescribed. The story itself is followable. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end, two clear characters, and a chain of events you can reconstruct without much trouble. The film is not scrambled the way a truly nonlinear puzzle-film is scrambled. What makes Through and Through hard is not that you cannot tell what happens but that the telling is relentlessly, deliberately uncomfortable, a formal machine engineered to keep you off balance for its entire running time. It is experimental in its grammar rather than its plot, and that distinction is the difference between a film you cannot follow and a film that follows you home.
The Debut That Scandalized Poland
To understand what Through and Through represented, you have to understand when it landed. The early 1970s were arguably the golden age of Polish art cinema, a period producing bold debuts and major works from a whole generation of ambitious filmmakers working under and around the constraints of the era. Into that crowded, accomplished field, a first-time feature director dropped something that looked and sounded like nothing else, and the reaction was violent in both directions.
Królikiewicz was branded a corrupter, an obscenity, a filmmaker deliberately assaulting his audience, and the hostility was real: the stories of viewers defacing the comment book and reacting with open disgust are part of the film’s legend. But the recognition was equally real. Through and Through won its director multiple honors, including a FIPRESCI prize and the Josef von Sternberg Award, and it announced Królikiewicz as one of the most formally daring voices in European cinema, a director frequently mentioned in the same breath as radical stylists like David Lynch and Peter Greenaway for the way he pursued a personal vision through form as much as content.
What I find genuinely admirable, and what the film’s whole subsequent reputation rests on, is that this is a debut with absolutely no interest in playing it safe. A young director working from a proven true-crime property could have made a respectable calling-card film and launched a comfortable career. Królikiewicz instead made the most difficult, confrontational thing he could imagine, and staked everything on the belief that form itself could carry moral and emotional weight. That is the kind of swing that either ends a career or defines one, and in his case it did the latter, launching an entire body of formally investigative, socially engaged Polish filmmaking. Through and Through is where that story starts, and the ambition of it is bracing even now.
Hard to Watch, Hard to Shake
I promised honesty, and honesty requires me to say plainly that Through and Through is a punishing experience, and that a significant number of viewers will not enjoy it in any conventional sense.
This is a film that holds you at arm’s length by design. It is cold where you want warmth, abstract where you want clarity, and relentless where you might want a moment to breathe. The oppressive sound design that so many admire is, for some viewers, simply exhausting. The withholding of dialogue and clear sightlines that reads as genius to one person reads as pretension to another. And the film’s refusal to offer any comfortable moral foothold, its insistence on sitting inside the experience of two murderers without judgment, is genuinely hard to sit with. This is not a film that wants to be liked, and it will not meet you halfway.
There is a real critical divide here, and it is worth naming honestly rather than papering over. To some viewers, Through and Through is deeply moving and thematically rich, a formally audacious masterpiece that uses every tool of cinema to make you feel the weight of a wasted life. To others, it is abstract, alienating, and frustrating, all technique and no pulse, a film easier to admire than to love. Both responses are legitimate, and which one you have will depend almost entirely on your appetite for difficulty and your patience with a film that treats discomfort as its primary mode.
My own view leans toward admiration, and I think the film earns its reputation. But I would be doing you a disservice if I sold it as an easy or even a pleasurable watch. It is neither. It is a significant, singular, genuinely important film that also happens to be a bit of an ordeal, and going in knowing that is the difference between meeting it on its terms and resenting it for not being something else.
A Rescue in 2K
Whatever the difficulty of the film, the disc is close to unimpeachable, and this is where the Through and Through Blu-ray becomes genuinely important rather than merely welcome. A note of transparency first: I am assessing this presentation from its confirmed restoration provenance and Radiance’s stated specifications rather than a frame-by-frame screening of my own copy, so read my confidence as informed rather than eyewitness.
Through and Through has been given a new 2K restoration, and the single best detail about it is who supervised the work: Bogdan Dziworski, the film’s own cinematographer, oversaw the restoration, which is about the strongest guarantee of fidelity to original intent that a catalog release can offer. When the person who lit and shot the film is the one signing off on how it looks in high definition, you are as close to the source as you are ever going to get. For a film this dependent on the precise deployment of its black-and-white imagery, that pedigree matters enormously.
By the accounts available, the results are excellent for a film of this age and budget. Clarity and detail are reported to be strong throughout, textures in clothing and walls and background surfaces rendered crisply without the waxy over-processing that ruins so many restorations, with deep, stable black levels and preserved shadow detail even in the film’s many dim interiors. There is a genuine sense of depth to the image that a lesser transfer would have flattened. For a movie that spent decades as an effectively inaccessible rarity, seen only in degraded grey-market copies when it could be seen at all, this is a transformation, and the black-and-white cinematography that is so central to the film’s power finally registers as the deliberate, controlled work it always was.
It is worth situating this within Radiance’s larger project, because Through and Through is a near-perfect example of what the label does. Radiance has built its reputation on digging up world-cinema obscurities that had slipped into near-total inaccessibility and giving them careful, scholarly, beautifully packaged releases, films that would otherwise remain rumors. It is the same rescue instinct behind their edition of the long-buried Bresson drama Une Femme Douce and their revival of the French road movie Fill ‘er Up with Super. Films like Through and Through do not survive on their own. Someone has to decide they matter, and the decision to give a Polish experimental debut this level of care is exactly why boutique physical media still matters.
Here are the technical particulars, for the buyers who want them:
- Format: Blu-ray, worldwide premiere, first time on the format anywhere
- Video: 1080p, new 2K restoration supervised by cinematographer Bogdan Dziworski
- Audio: original uncompressed mono PCM
- Region: ABC (region-free)
- Certificate: 15
- Runtime: roughly 70 minutes
- Country: Poland, in Polish with English subtitles
- Edition: limited to 2,000 copies, full-height Scanavo packaging with a removable peach OBI strip and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork
- Catalog: RAD129BDLE
- Release date: August 2025
Mono, and the Roar of It
The audio on the Through and Through Blu-ray arrives as the film’s original uncompressed mono PCM, and on a film where the sound design is arguably the single most important element, that lossless fidelity is not a luxury but a necessity.
I have already said that the soundtrack of Through and Through functions less as accompaniment than as an instrument of unease, an oppressive, rhythmic, layered wall of noise that Królikiewicz uses to keep the viewer perpetually on edge. A film built on that principle lives or dies on the quality of its audio presentation, and a clean, uncompressed mono track is exactly what the material demands. This was never a stereo or surround experience, and there is no attempt here to inflate it into one. What you get is the mono mix as it was designed, presented with the clarity to let every deliberate discomfort land.
There is a purity to this approach that suits the film perfectly. Modern remixes and artificial surround upmixes would actively damage a soundtrack this precisely engineered, smearing across channels the very effects that depend on their claustrophobic containment. Radiance’s decision to preserve the original mono, losslessly and without embellishment, is the correct and respectful one. Newly prepared English subtitles round out a presentation that clearly takes both authenticity and accessibility seriously, opening a difficult Polish-language film to an English-speaking audience that has had almost no legitimate way to see it until now.
From the Vaults: Three Shorts and a Scholar
The supplements on the Through and Through Blu-ray are compact but exceptionally well chosen, and for admirers of the director they contain something close to a holy grail.
That grail is a trio of Królikiewicz short films, the kind of extra that turns a single-film disc into a genuine portrait of an artist. You get Everyone Gets What They Don’t Need from 1966, Brothers from 1971, and Don’t Cry from 1972, spanning the years leading up to his feature debut and offering a rare chance to watch a distinctive sensibility take shape in miniature. These are decently presented and, as early short work tends to be, of uneven quality, but that unevenness is itself fascinating, a document of a major filmmaker figuring out in real time the ideas that would explode into full form in his first feature. For anyone interested in how an artist’s voice develops, these shorts are worth the price of the disc on their own.
The other key extra is a new interview with critic and scholar Michał Oleszczyk, and for a film this dependent on context, that kind of expert framing is invaluable. Through and Through is easy to admire and hard to understand, a film whose formal choices and historical moment both benefit enormously from an informed guide, and a thoughtful interview does the work of turning a bewildering experience into a legible and richer one. The disc is completed by a limited-edition booklet featuring new writing by critic Ela Bittencourt, who has a genuine connection to the material, and whose essay supplies exactly the cultural and biographical grounding the film needs.
On the physical side, this is a typically handsome Radiance object: a limited edition of 2,000 copies in full-height Scanavo packaging with the label’s signature removable OBI strip, here in a distinctive peach, which lets you strip the certificates and barcodes for a clean shelf display. The reversible sleeve pairs original artwork with a newly commissioned design. It is a smartly assembled, restrained package that trusts the film and its context to do the work rather than burying the disc in filler, and that restraint is itself a kind of respect.
Who Should Take the Case
If you are deciding whether the Through and Through Blu-ray belongs on your shelf, here is the honest breakdown, and the dividing lines are unusually stark.
Adventurous cinephiles and students of experimental film should treat this as essential. Through and Through is a genuine landmark of formal innovation, a film that does things with off-frame space and sound design that almost nothing else attempts, and its influence and reputation are entirely earned. If you care about the outer edges of what cinema can do, this is a foundational text, and this is the first time it has ever been properly available.
Admirers of the Polish golden age and Eastern European cinema have a clear reason to buy. This is a key work from one of the richest periods in Polish film history, from a director who went on to a significant career, and the restoration finally lets it take its place in that canon rather than languishing as an inaccessible rumor.
Collectors of Radiance and boutique world cinema will recognize this as exactly the kind of rescue that justifies the label’s existence, and the three bonus short films make it an unusually generous package for a single-feature release. As an object and an act of preservation, it is a standout.
Casual viewers and anyone seeking entertainment should approach with real caution, and this is the warning that matters most. Through and Through is difficult, cold, abstract, and deliberately uncomfortable, a film that assaults as often as it moves, and it is emphatically not a relaxing night in. If you need warmth, momentum, or a clear emotional payoff, this will frustrate you, and no amount of restoration changes that. This is a film to be reckoned with, not enjoyed in the ordinary sense, and there is no shame in deciding that reckoning is not what you are in the mood for.
The Verdict Rings Out
Through and Through is a hard, brilliant, genuinely important film, and Radiance has given it exactly the release such a film deserves. It is not a good time. It is not meant to be. It is a formally fearless excavation of poverty, humiliation, and the terrible things people do to feel briefly real, built by a first-time director who refused every safe choice available to him, and it has the scars and the power of that refusal in every frame. Fifty years on, it has lost none of its capacity to disturb, and that is precisely the point.
What Radiance has done is take a film that was effectively lost to all but the most determined specialists and make it available to the world for the first time, in a careful 2K restoration overseen by the man who shot it, surrounded by the context and the early work needed to understand it. That is preservation at its most valuable, rescuing not a crowd-pleaser but a genuinely significant and genuinely challenging work that the culture would be poorer for losing. For the film, a strong recommendation to the right, adventurous viewer, and a candid warning to everyone else. For the release, nothing but admiration.
The bottom line: A formally radical, deeply uncomfortable Polish masterwork about a poor couple’s descent into murder gets a landmark worldwide Blu-ray premiere from Radiance. The 2K restoration, supervised by the film’s own cinematographer, is excellent, the original mono is preserved with total fidelity, and the inclusion of three of the director’s short films makes for a rich, well-chosen package. The film is a genuine achievement and a genuine ordeal in equal measure. Essential for adventurous cinephiles and admirers of Polish cinema, a careful rental at most for everyone else. 86 out of 100.
Through and Through is now available on Blu-ray from Radiance Films
You can order the limited edition of Through and Through directly from Radiance Films, or through their North American partners including MVD and Diabolik. With only 2,000 copies pressed of a film this long unavailable, this is one for the adventurous to grab before it slips back into the obscurity it spent five decades in.
