Review by Coventry

For only the second or third time in my IMDB "career", I'm submitting a user-comment that isn't accompanied by a rating. It's not a statement, it's simply because I honestly wouldn't know what rating I could give to "The Third Part of the Night". This obviously is a remarkable, hauntingly surreal, and intelligent debut feature (from the same man who would later make the even more confusing and incomprehensibly popular "Possession" in 1981) that made a severe impact on me. That would mean a high rating, but I honestly can't give a good score to a film that I literally had to struggle myself through from shortly after the start until the very end. This isn't why I watch films. I love strangeness, surrealism, experimental stuff, and shocking footage, but I always need a minimum of entertainment value and tangibleness. There's none of that, for sure.

The first 10-15 minutes promising a captivating albeit emotionally exhausting drama/thriller. A Polish man loses his wife and child following an attack of German soldiers, but he almost seems to get a "second chance" when he ends up in the flat of a woman in labor who looks exactly like his murdered wife. From there onwards, I admit, not a lot of things made any sense to me. Medical experiments with lice, a protagonist torn between preservation and self-sacrifice, and endless amounts of images & symbolism of horrible death. And you can't afford to revert your attention for even a second, because the film is extremely talkative, and I depended on the English subtitles as don't understand Polish. As I said already, exhausting.