HORROR STORY. Laughter Through Tears [REVIEW]

A shy, slightly anemic Tomek (Jakub Zając) is looking for a cheap room to rent. He eventually stumbles upon a rundown villa in the middle of nowhere, which—putting it mildly—doesn’t make the best impression. Shortly after stepping inside, he realizes he’s made a mistake. Possibly the biggest one of his twenty-year-old life. The house isn’t haunted, but it’s filled to the brim with lunatics, which is just as dangerous. His innate indecisiveness traps him in the film’s narrative snare—tossed between rooms like a ragdoll, he slowly begins to understand that he may never leave this cursed building. What you’ve just read is the plot summary of Stancja, a short film that served as the narrative foundation for Adrian Apanel’s feature debut. The director took the starting point from his thirty-minute experiment: a disturbing location filled with even more disturbing inhabitants. But he added one of the greatest nightmares of any person—especially a young one—the search for a job. This is the core theme of Horror Story. Tomek (once again played brilliantly by Jakub Zając) no longer bounces off the doors of mentally unstable roommates but instead slams against glass ceilings and demonic job interviews. Each new situation pushes him to the edge of endurance: how much humiliation can one person take?

Tomek can endure quite a lot—mainly because the film’s structure demands it. Horror Story is a tragicomedy: a kind-hearted yet relentless farce that torments its protagonist. It carries an absurd sense of humor, somewhat reminiscent of Woody Allen. Tomek fits seamlessly into the mold of Allen’s characters: a well-meaning but awkward bespectacled man. Intelligent but shy. Dreaming of grand love but experiencing spectacular failures in that department. Though he isn’t particularly exceptional, he’s incredibly easy to like. Yes, Tomek is the perfect everyman—the perfect subject for a tidal wave of misfortunes and unlucky coincidences, while we, the audience, watch to see if he can stay afloat. The laughter in Horror Story is tinged with genuine empathy.

The bluntly simple title might suggest a traditional genre film, but Apanel is only interested in select elements of horror, not the whole package. From horror (and his own short film), he borrows the eerie setting and its oddball inhabitants—most notably a white-haired old woman who, under the cover of night, tells the protagonist tales of undead Nazis from wartime. But don’t get your hopes up—there are no SS zombies crawling out of graves in Apanel’s film. The real horror here is something else: adulthood. The societal pressure to settle down, both personally and professionally. Tomek desperately wants to gain independence, but the world won’t let him. His roommates aren’t exactly role models: one is a computer geek obsessed with Lara Croft’s pixelated bust, and the other is a tracksuit-clad Peter Pan who makes a living selling Gypsy carpets under the table. Then again, maybe they have it figured out—perhaps, consciously or not, they’ve opted out of the capitalist rat race.

A college diploma fails to impress Tomek’s potential employers, who bombard him with increasingly absurd interview questions. “How would you organize an office parade?” “If you could transform into any type of milk, which would it be?” The satire of corporate jargon is pushed to the extreme—almost audaciously so. But at the same time, it brings to mind real-life horror stories from job interviews, reinforcing the film’s exaggerated dialogue with a grounding sense of reality. “How many doorknobs are in this building?”—this was reportedly a common question on entrance exams for the Łódź Film School. Why? Only the person who installed the doors seventy years ago probably knows the answer.

In his mini-review of Horror Story, critic Tomasz Raczek admitted that he doesn’t understand young people who laugh during the film “as if they were watching a stand-up show or a comedy skit.” I do understand, even though I haven’t laughed at stand-up or sketch comedy since I was twelve. Apanel’s film draws its comedic strength from social truths buried beneath layers of absurdity. Finding a decent, well-paying job after college (especially with a humanities degree) feels like an impossible mission—even for someone like Ethan Hunt. The laughter here is, in part, a defense mechanism. We crack up in our seats because we see exaggerated reflections of our own frustrations in Tomek’s predicament.

The dysfunction of the job market is best summarized in a brief scene where Tomek runs into his old college crush. Their conversation starts off awkwardly but picks up when they begin discussing work struggles. “Did you know that 70 percent of job openings are filled under the table before recruitment even starts?” she asks with a slight, sadistic pleasure in her voice. Everything seems to be going well—until she pulls out perfume samples, and Tomek realizes he’s being lured into a pyramid scheme. Curtain falls. Laughter through tears—genuine laughter and genuine tears.