Following his feature debut, Next to Nothing, Polish director Grzegorz Dębowski returns with What Belongs to Others, presented in the Orizzonti section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. Working in a recognisably social-realist register, Dębowski again focuses on people living on the margins of Polish society. In his sophomore feature, however, he tempers the bleakness with crime conventions, investigative intrigue and an unexpectedly hopeful belief in human connection.

Kasia (Monika Kwiatkowska) lives with her verbally abusive boyfriend, Darek (Robert Mania). Facing eviction, the couple embark on a burglary spree through a block of flats, targeting apartments whose occupants have left their doors unlocked. After Darek is arrested during another attempted theft, Kasia finds herself alone and homeless. She returns to one of the flats they previously robbed, despite having discovered its owner’s body hanging from the ceiling.

Driven by financial necessity, Kasia continues pawning the dead man’s possessions and attempts to claim his life-insurance money by posing as his partner. The deception draws her into his past, and brings her into contact with his elderly mother, estranged sister and former wife. What begins as an opportunistic scam gradually allows her to assume a place within his fractured family.

Although What Belongs to Others adopts the observational aesthetics and marginalised milieu associated with socially engaged Eastern European cinema, Dębowski does not turn Kasia’s plight into a sustained diagnosis of the structures that produced it. Instead, poverty becomes the engine of a crime-drama and an unusual investigative mystery, asking not “who killed the dead man?”, but “who was he?” The film retains the texture of social realism while moving away from its more austere narrative tendencies.

In this respect, the feature could be likened to an inverted version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem. Whereas Pasolini’s enigmatic visitor enters an apparently stable bourgeois household and precipitates its collapse, Kasia elbows her way into a family that has already fallen apart and inadvertently begins to draw its members together. Her intrusion is both parasitic and restorative, with deception becoming the catalyst for a temporary reconciliation.

Working with cinematographer Stanisław Horodecki, Dębowski favours mobile long takes that follow Kasia without any interruptions, keeping the viewer close to her while preserving the movie’s quasi-documentary quality. The risk that her deception will be exposed adds suspense, allowing the film to combine observational social drama with the mechanics of a thriller. Dębowski largely resists overt moralising, leaving the ethical unease festering beneath the more hopeful trajectory.

The eventual movement towards restitution gives the story a redemptive feel and introduces some sentimentality. Yet it also reveals Dębowski’s broader strategy: rather than allowing the film to settle into arthouse miserabilism, he uses genre and catharsis to fashion a more audience-friendly form of social cinema.

What Belongs to Others was produced by Agnieszka Skalska for Poland’s Blue Onion, and co-produced by the Mazovia Warsaw Film Fund, the Podkarpackie Regional Film Fund, Koi Studio, Color Pro and Ucho Studio. Its international sales are handled by New Europe Film Sales.