(Nie)znajomi

Seven friends gather at a house for dinner. At the table someone proposes a game: the phones go on the table, every message that arrives during the evening is read out loud, and every call is put on speaker. Nobody can object, because whoever objects has admitted they have something to hide. The phones start ringing and the table slowly falls apart. The film is the Polish adaptation of Paolo Genovese's Perfetti sconosciuti from 2016. That film became one of the most remade productions in the world, with its own version made in more than twenty countries. Tadeusz Śliwa's adaptation here carries the text into Poland: the same mould, different taboos. Tomasz Kot and Maja Ostaszewska are in the cast. The force of the mould does not change, because the subject is not phones; it is how little everyone knows about everyone else.