A cautionary tale with impressive world-building, Szulkin’s totalitarian mini-universe on the verge of anarchy—or annihilation—is set in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust as people are holed up in a crumbling dome.
Review #2,966
Dir. Piotr Szulkin
1985 | Poland | Drama, Sci-Fi | 86min | 1.85:1 | Polish
Not rated – likely to be M18 for nudity
Cast: Jerzy Stuhr, Krystyna Janda, Kalina Jędrusik
Plot: A year has passed since the nuclear war, and 800 sick and hungry people have taken shelter in a concrete building. They are waiting for the landing of The Ark, a mythical vessel that is supposed to bring collective salvation.
Awards: –
Source: WFDiF
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Post-Apocalypse; Survival & Exploitation; Decay & Destruction
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: MUBI
Spoilers: No
My second Piotr Szulkin film after The War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981), O-bi, O-ba: The End of Civilisation is just as interesting, visually and conceptually. Its world-building here feels a tad more immersive, though it is bleak as hell, as the story situates us in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
Several hundreds of people are holed up in a crumbling dome that protects them from the radiation outside.
As they seek salvation in the form of an Ark that would bring them to a safe place, one man, Soft (Jerzy Stuhr, who passed away in 2024), realises that this Ark is fictive, a religious indoctrination tactic to control the people and give them false hope, much like how state propaganda via broadcast media is thematised in Next Century as it depicts the invading, blood-sucking aliens as ‘good’.
In this totalitarian mini-universe on the verge of anarchy—or perhaps simply, annihilation—Szulkin paints with intense hues of blues an acute sense of despair and exploitation.
“Don’t believe rumours and superstitions. Your today and tomorrow depend only on you.”
In some way, it works as a more economical (runtime and budget-wise) sister film to his Polish compatriot Andrzej Zulawski’s long-gestating sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe (1988), where civilisation is formed on an inhospitable planet before a messiah arrives.
With the threat of nuclear war remaining palpable late in the Cold War during the ‘80s, O-bi, O-ba showed audiences the ghastly fate of humanity if we had continued to go down the path of mutual destruction.
Seeing it today amid heightened tensions in the Middle East and Ukraine caused by escalating war rhetoric by the Western elites against, as some have described, the ‘anti-imperialist resistances’ of the world, I can’t help but feel the weight of human folly in every shot of Szulkin’s cautionary tale.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 