The Codes

Story

Tadeusz (Jan Kreczmar) is a Polish veteran of World War II who fled to London at the end of the war, leaving behind his wife Zofia (Irena Eichlerówna) and son, Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), who disappeared when he was 12 years old.

Tadeusz returns to Kraków to discover that Maciek is alive, his wife may have been a partisan, and that his son may have turned his own mother in to the authorities.

During Maciek's struggle to understand his parents' history, questions arise concerning collaboration with the Gestapo and retribution by the Home Army. Has pictures the mystical lost boy in a dark fairy-tale forest, full of the war's ghosts and wholesale executions. The hypnotic quality of these excursions foreshadows the mesmerizing passages of Has' later film, The Hour-Glass Sanatorium.

Cast