Golem

• Director Piotr Szulkin's feature debut, co-written with critic Tadeusz Sobolewski. It launched his loosely connected science-fiction tetralogy, followed by War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981), O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985), and Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986).
• The screenplay pulls from Gustav Meyrink's 1915 novel The Golem and Prague-Jewish folklore, but swaps the clay automaton for a genetic clone — Pernat is built as an empty replica of a real man who has gone missing.
• Marek Walczewski plays Pernat. The cast also includes Krystyna Janda, who had broken out three years earlier in Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble.
• The score comes from Zygmunt Konieczny and Józef Skrzek — Skrzek being the keyboardist of the Polish prog-rock outfit SBB, whom Szulkin had filmed in earlier documentary work.
• Shot by cinematographer Zygmunt Samosiuk in a 1.66:1 frame, the film leans on a muddy palette of greys, browns and yellows and deliberately artificial staging instead of conventional sci-fi spectacle.
• Made during the dying years of Communist Poland, it functions as a dark Kafkaesque satire of the regime Szulkin was actually living under. A 2K restoration was later supervised by Szulkin himself with sound engineer Nikodem Wolk-Laniewski and released on UK Blu-ray by Second Run in February 2025.

The whole interrogation-and-release loop reads as a closed feedback experiment: every figure Pernat meets is part of the apparatus testing whether a manufactured human will spontaneously generate a conscience. The murder he's accused of isn't a crime to solve — it's the variable they're measuring, watching to see if the copy feels guilt the original would have.

The deliberately fake staging — the green light, the theatrical sets, the world that never quite coheres — isn't a budget limitation but the point of view. We're seeing reality as the clone perceives it: a half-rendered simulation, because Pernat himself is a half-rendered person who can't fully resolve the world around him.

Read against late-1970s Poland, the golem-as-clone is the New Socialist Man — a being engineered by the state to replace an inconvenient predecessor, fed an identity from above, then punished for failing to behave like the authentic human it was built to imitate.

A man called Pernat wakes in a rotting post-nuclear city with no memory and a murder charge waiting for him. Interrogators hammer him for answers he doesn't have, then release him into a maze of paranoid bureaucrats, broken neighbors, and clinicians who treat his existence as a lab result. Szulkin drags Meyrink's clay man out of Prague legend and rebuilds him as a manufactured human — a hollow copy chasing the question of whether anything inside him is real, or just programming dressed up as a soul.