Welcome to my 2026 project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.

Today’s feature is from the year 2002, we are headed to Poland to contemplate where it all went wrong in…

Movie: Dzień świra [Day of the Wacko]
Year: 2002
Director: Marek Koterski
Country: Poland
The Elevator Pitch: Adam Miauczynski slowly unravels on a normal day as he contemplates the indignity of being alive.

How Was the Movie?:  

I think I enjoyed this, or at least as much as one can enjoy a man slowly being driven insane by himself and his world. The thing is that this movie seems like it might be kind of an institution in Poland as the director has made 9 movies “about this character”. I say it like that because the movies are all kind of alternative universe movies about a guy who is almost kind of the same in each one but different – think James Bond. 

This movie is also part of the oeuvre we’ve been watching which is “movies which are beloved locally but not always highly critically acclaimed and mostly unknown outside of the place of origin”. We’ve watched The Castle, Fantozzi, and Package Tour and I’d include Day of the Wacko in that type of movie as well. It’s so well known locally that it got a play adaptation but no one outside of Poland is likely to have heard of it.

Speaking of, Day of the Wacko distinctly reminded me of Fantozzi, which also a movie made up of small snippets of a man experiencing petty trauma after indignity and losing his mind a little over it. I want to be sympathetic to the main character in Wacko, whose languishing mental illness goes basically unchecked and untreated for the entire film, but he’s such a vindictive and petty man that it’s easy to feel like he is being punished on purpose at times.

Aside from his own traumas he suffers problems that arise mostly from being human. Each of the dozens of small things that happen to him aren’t terrible in themselves. Having someone cut in line, not connecting with his son, having an awkward neighbor, a man is outside playing the accordion while he tries to work, or even stepping in dog shit all add only one horrible element to his life at a time until it becomes a deeper question of how he reached the point wherein his life in unbearable.

While it definitely has fingerprints in it from the specific time and place it was made, I was surprised that other than some visual indicators and jokes this movie could have been made in many places at any time during the past 30 years.

I wouldn’t recommend the movie, it is deeply uncomfortable and possibly triggering for people with certain types of mental illness. It’s brash and rude and sexist as well but it is also very honest about some of the weird disconnections and realities we all live in. It also deeply is about a man who blames women for his ills that he makes no effort to correct – that’s so 2002, but also every year since. It is a deeply cynical movie but since it feels like it was made yesterday, was it entirely wrong?

What was for Dinner?: 

For dinner I made kołduny which are a type of Polish meat filled dumplings (who doesn’t love a dumpling?). I filled mine with a mixture of ground chicken, mushrooms, and onions and they were absolutely fantastic. The recipe is interesting to me because I’m used to making dumplings with cooked filling but this one calls for raw meat. I cooked the vegetables and left the meat raw which worried me but the recipes I came across said not to worry and that the meat would be cooked by the time they floated. They were (happily) correct, we did not eat raw chicken. I served the kołduny in rosół which is just a clear chicken soup that I made with no noodles because dumplings AND noodles seemed like over kill. I also bought some rye bread from the store to stand-in for chleb żytni but I realize chleb żytni actually has white wheat flour in it and I bought 100% rye bread. Oops, still delicious.

I ended up making about 80 dumplings in 2 batches. My first batch I wasn’t happy with the texture of the dough and could not figure out how to fold them (on the left). The second batch went much better and I made things almost resembling something nice! I’ve never been good at making attractive food and I suppose I don’t intend to start now. They both tasted great which is all that matters in the end!

That’s it for 2002, see you in the future year of 2003!