Set in Warsaw, Poland, the film compares the senseless, violent murder of an individual to the cold, calculated execution by the state.

Jacek Łazar (Mirosław Baka) is a 19-year-old drifter who recently arrived in Warsaw from the countryside and is now aimlessly wandering the streets of the city.

He seems to take pleasure in causing other people's misfortunes: he throws a stranger into the urinals of a public toilet after being approached sexually; he drops a large stone from a bridge onto a passing vehicle causing an accident; and he scares away pigeons to spite an old lady who was feeding them.

Piotr Balicki (Krzysztof Globisz) is a young and idealistic lawyer who has just passed the bar exam.

The judge says that Piotr gave the best argument against the death penalty he has heard in years, but that the legal outcome is correct.

In the moments before his execution, Jacek reveals to Piotr that his younger sister was killed by a tractor driven by his drunken friend, and that he was drinking with him; he says he never fully recovered from the tragic episode.

Jacek then requests that he be given the final space in his family's grave which was reserved for his mother—that he be buried next to his sister and his father.

When he requests to have one without filter instead, the executioner steps forward, lights one of his cigarettes and puts it into Jacek's mouth.

After the early years of Communist repression, executions were quite rare and invariably for murder; from 1969 a total of 183 men were hanged and no women.

[5] Cine-literacy author Charles V. Eidsvik suggests there is a "presence of senseless malice in the film", a notion reiterated in the forms of death and mutiny.

Kieślowski credits his cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, for this deliberate visual unattractiveness within the film, stating: "I sense that the world is becoming more and more ugly.

Kieslowski was not pleased, but he accepted the ultimatum, telling Idziak, "if you want to make green shit, it’s your affair."

The cinematographer concluded, "That’s how the graphic concept came about which Cahiers Du Cinema wrote that it was the most originally shot movie in the Cannes Film Festival.

Like the gloomy events portrayed in the film, the capital city of Warsaw is depicted as a repellent, depressing place: grey, brutal and peopled by alienated characters.

Several areas of the city were used:[9] The Polish premiere coincided with a heated debate in Poland about capital punishment.

[14] According to the funding deal that Kieślowski had with TV Poland to make Dekalog, two of the episodes would be expanded into films.