Marek Koterski's Dzień świra | Day of the Wacko (2002)

Adaś Miauczyński (Marek Kondrat) is a divorced Polish teacher with obsessive compulsive disorder, but really he's a professional complainer. He can't stand tiny noises that grate on him, he's disturbed by the presence and the activities of people on trains; if he goes to sunbathe on a beach other people appear and talk to each other mindlessly, even a seagull annoys him and he wants to kill it; when he spills cornflakes on the kitchen floor he has to pick them up and eat them as people in underdeveloped countries are starving.

His life is ritual: counting the seconds it takes to piss; counting the number of gulps of water; adjusting his crotch as he sits down on the sofa and spreads his legs out, slightly crossing them; he could be a candidate for the funny farm.

Yet it certainly wasn't the forgetting to kiss the crucifix that got me, it was the constant returns to check that he'd locked his door that made me think of Philip Larkin's 'something sufficiently toad-like / Squats in me, too': yep, something Adaś-like is in me. Or is that in every‌one? Isn't Adaś no more than a huge exaggeration of us all? Fascinating, and infuriating, film that bites you on the ass.