They go on talking about experimental infections with lice going on when they witness a German officer at a market kick a man and shoot him with his Luger pistol and walk away.
Marian kneels at the body and asks where meaning, law and God has gone in the "void and medieval darkness" that "life has become", saying that "a cry must burst out of this country's soul".
Back in the apartments where the woman with her baby live, he see nuns praying for a dying man, asking one of them if there is some meaning which he is unable to grasp.
He and other patients have a heated discussion on authors like Nietzsche, Spengler, Proust and Balzac when a memory from "when all the professors was taken away" is mentioned, and Michal imagines the same nurse as his wife again.
Michal enters the hospital's labs and through his microscope he picks apart lice that have fed on his blood during the lice-feeding typhus experiments.
As Michal look over the bed he sees a crack in the floor and under it the corpse of an old woman in a coffin surrounded by candles lies facing up straight towards him.
Another roundup of people takes place and the nun he talked to earlier willingly enters one of the Germans' trucks of prisoners.
After leaving for a planned mission, Michal is pulled away in the last second by a woman who says that it's a trap, and they watch the other resistance members dragged out from a house by the Germans, and arrested, beaten, shot, etc., on the street.
After leaving, the father sets fire to his violin notes on the floor, repeating a Latin prayer while going up in the fiery inferno.
He is shocked, and a shot is heard and Michal is hit in the neck and falls bloody down some stairs, sees a familiar looking woman get pushed into what looks like a lobby, then crawls backwards in terror, finding himself in a corridor with rows of Gestapo cells, with the lifeless body of a tortured prisoner in a chair in each cell, he stumbles in panic into his family villa where it all began, with the three bodies of his family next to each other on the main entrance floor.
[4] Variety said "Zulawski is certainly a man to watch when he marshals and assimilates his influences more thoroughly", and remarked: "the film may try to say a bit too much, and sometimes its allusions remain too personal.
But, overall, it has a grim but incisive insight into a time of terror when any order seems illusory and man becomes almost like the lice he works with in the laboratory.
"[5] Indiewire commented that "rarely does a debut film represent the arrival of an artist with sensibilities so fully formed," and added: "This is no typical war movie, but rather a dreamscape of anxieties and memories, where past experience is likely to be recalled through the sort of dimly-suggested narrative ellipses.
"[6] Le Monde called it a "half-real, half-dreamed adventure, a stunning phantasm, carried by the lyricism of the violence and the anguish of the places that evoke death, running blood, penetrating fear.
In his review on the film, Sachs wrote, "A sustained nightmare about societal and personal breakdown, it presents one man's descent into madness during the Nazi occupation of Poland, though the story is hard to follow (perhaps by design).
Żuławski divulges important information about the characters in short, unexpected bursts, and the plot moves sinuously between the hero's present, past, and dream life.