Puszcza (1932) review - A weird, creaky trip into the Polish woods

If you are looking for a fast-paced thriller to watch tonight, absolutely do not watch this film. You will be bored out of your mind within ten minutes. 🌲

But if you love dusty, crackly old European cinema where people wear heavy wool coats and stare intensely at trees, it is a weirdly cozy time machine. I watched a grainy copy of this and honestly, I am still thinking about how strange it felt.

The story is basically about rich people going out to the wilderness to hunt and make a mess of their love lives. It is based on a novel by Józef Weyssenhoff, which explains why there is so much focus on the *atmosphere* of the forest rather than actual plot.

Sometimes the camera just lingers on the pine needles for so long you wonder if the cameraman fell asleep. But those outdoor shots are easily the best part of the whole thing.

The indoor scenes are a different story. The sound recording is so primitive that everyone sounds like they are whispering into a tin can underwater. 📻

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Puszcza (1932) through its definitive frames.

And the acting is... well, it is very 1932. Andrzej Karewicz spends most of his screen time looking like he just realized he left his stove on back in Warsaw.

But then, Ina Benita shows up on screen and the movie instantly gets better. She had this incredible screen presence, even when the script gave her almost nothing to do but look dramatic in the shadows.

The absolute highlight of the movie has nothing to do with the main plot. The filmmakers hired a real Gypsy group, the Zespól Cyganski Kwieków, and they just take over the movie for a while.

They start playing these frantic, beautiful violin tunes and the movie just stops dead to watch them. It is fantastic, even if it makes no sense structurally.

It actually reminded me a bit of another odd Polish film from around that era, Palac na kólkach, which had that same loose, traveling-show energy. They just do not make movies with this kind of messy charm anymore.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Puszcza (1932) through its definitive frames.

There is also this one hilarious moment where a hunting dog wanders into the shot. He clearly was not supposed to be there, and he just spends two minutes sniffing a log in the background while the actors try to look serious.

I ended up watching the dog instead of the main characters. 🐕

So yeah, it is not a masterpiece by any means. The pacing is uneven, the audio is a mess, and the romance is pretty melodramatic.

But there is something so honest about how creaky it is. It feels like finding an old, faded postcard in an attic.

Some random thoughts I scribbled down:

• The sound of the wind blowing through the trees sounds exactly like someone blowing directly into a microphone.
• One of the guys in the hunting party has a mustache so big it deserves its own credit in the cast.
• The transition between the hunting scenes and the romance scenes is so abrupt it almost gives you whiplash.
• I am pretty sure one of the extras in the background is just a local farmer who got confused and wandered onto the set.