The Spiral

In the middle of winter a man drives up to a hotel in the mountains, throws away his keys and goes inside. He speaks with an urgency that unsettles everyone he meets; there is something he wants to say and cannot. Then he leaves the hotel and disappears into the snow. The people who found him strange later go out to look for him and find him frostbitten but alive. When they visit him at the medical institution he has been taken to, they slowly understand what was really happening. The film takes as its subject the fear of death and a person’s inability to speak of it. Jan Nowicki plays the lead in Krzysztof Zanussi’s eighty three minute Polish film, completed in 1978.