Małgorzata Szumowska | W imię... (In the Name Of) / 2013

a different notion of morality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Małgorzata Szumowska, Michal Englert, and Szczepan Twardoch (screenplay), Małgorzata Szumowska (director) W imię... (In the Name Of) / 2013

 

This Polish film of 2013 received mixed reviews, particularly from seemingly sympathetic commentators who couldn’t quite understand the perspective of the filmmaker Małgorzata Szumowska given the film’s equivocations of the central character’s gay characterization.

 

     Letterboxd commentator Michael Scott summarizes his questions about the film in this manner:

“In a remote Polish village, a middle aged priest struggles with his attraction to a young intellectually delayed farmhand while trying to pull a rabble of godless delinquents into line through the healing power of odd jobs and shirtless football.

     If I am being perfectly honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand director Malgorzata Szumowska's motivations for making In the Name Of. Generally films focusing on homosexuality in the church come at the theme with a very defined bent (pun intended) and make no bones about which side of the argument they fall. Szumowska and her co-writer Michal Englert (who

incidentally also worked as cinematographer here and on The Congress) seem to want to play the both sides but in continually jumping the fence they only end up impaling themselves.

     Chief amongst the issues is the treatment of the film's central character, hot Priest Adam, played by Andrzej Chyra. He's an upstanding man of the cloth and Szumowska and Englert go to great pains to stress not only his moral fortitude but also his disinterest in young boys, at least in the sexual sense. And yet, despite this, their camera spends the first hour languishing on the bodies of the boys of the parish, taking every opportunity to fetishise them, seemingly (and somewhat contradictorily) under the guise of presenting Father Adam's desire."

    Yes,  we do observe the often half-naked and even fully naked delinquent boys surrounding Priest Adam and his assistant teacher Michal (Łukasz Simlat), but the boys themselves, I would argue, highly aware of their allure and equally homophobic themselves attempt to challenge the Priest, particularly the new tough Blondi (Tomasz Schuchardt), who as a gay boy takes advantage of another sexually confused student among Adam’s not fully reformed boys, a young gay boy who seeks out the help of the priest, who cannot perhaps fully help him without admitting his own homosexual desires. The only advice that Adam can provide is that, as he himself does, he take long morning runs, obviously an ineffectual answer for a young boy in terror of discovery.

     Moreover, in this isolated backwater Polish world to which Adam has requested reassignment after a previous incident involving his sexuality, many highly religious community, including his teacher’s wife Ewa (Maja Ostaszewska), are desperate for affection and love; Ewa tries hard, without any success, to tempt the priest to take her into his bed.

     Even the Church heads realize that Adam is a good and caring priest, who has done wonders for the boys and served the community well as the local priest. And Adam, despite his desires, is definitely not, as he later makes clear, a pedophile.

     Adam is not fetishizing these boys, even if Szumowska’s camera does so purposely, to make us aware of their own realization of their sexual power and their sublimated attempts to challenge the priest whose sexuality they, like Ewa, challenge.

     Temptation comes instead from a local boy, a kind, hard-working, perhaps mentally challenged hunk named "Dynia" Lukasz (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz) whose entire family seem mentally deficient, but who himself is a loyal helper to Adam in his daily duties.

      The movie purposely does not throw its sympathy to Adam’s gay desires since the priest himself is desperately attempting to remain true to his priestly codes of abstinence.

    But because he is loving and protective of Dynia, the young adult himself becomes equally protective of his mentor, perhaps the only one in his life who has ever given him a second thought, let alone given him the opportunity and responsibility of helping others.

     Their relationship begins when Adam saves his life by retrieving him from a local river spot where the boys have gone swim, like the others Dynia diving in but without knowing how to swim. To save the boy’s life Adam must give him mouth to mouth resuscitation.

     Soon after, as the two back home, Dynia suddenly speeds off into a local cornfield, hiding until Adam enters it in search of him. The boy howls like an ape, Adam soon calling in kind, perhaps first as simply a joke, but soon realizing that it is a kind of mating cry, the two almost courting one another in the language of the beasts.

     Poland remains a cruelly homophobic world today; just visit the film the 2020 short work, Colorful Picture by Karol Chwierut if you need evidence. And when the reformatory boys whisper among themselves of the priest possibly being a faggot, Dynia rushes violently to his defense, himself being beaten by the cruel boys, and bringing him only closer to Adam, who nurses his beautiful charge who the boys, perhaps not so affectionately had named “Humpty” back to healthy, the boy curling up on the couch with his savior a bit like an animal hungry for attention and physical affection.

      In such a hot house of anger and desire, is it any wonder that the priest, try as hard as he can, grows more and more tempted. It is not only his sexual desires by his empathetic kindness that increasingly draws him to his “humpty” until he can no longer restrain himself, the stolid Catholic Mikal, who cannot even satisfy his wife, noticing them together in a parked car, perhaps not even having sex but simply holding on to one another in need of the human touch.

      Adam hurries off to the local religious superior in hope of confession, but the church has closed down for a weekend cleaning, and furthermore Mikal has already beaten him to the priest with a worried letter regarding Adam’s behavior.

      Adam attempts to discuss his condition with his sister living in Toronto via Skype, but she equally attempts to swat his feelings away. He tries to explain that the young boy he is charge hung himself because his father regularly beat him, that he wanted to hug him to protect him but didn’t dare bring himself to so; he wants to do good, he proclaims, but the love he has to offer is confused with desire both by the society around him and his own sexual needs. He tries to explain that he has again been called to the curia and will once more be transferred by the bishop. “How can I help it that I love these boys?” he asks. Her answer is simply “Stop talking rubbish.”

    He admits he “could fuck all of them,” while she responds that she not talk to him while he is drunk. He explains it in such simple terms, “I just wanted a hug,” that any sensitive person might comprehend, but even his pleas, his tears mean nothing to her, just as it is treated in his world in Poland; and she hangs up despite to attempts for a simple honest hearing or response.

      Even Mikal is sorry for his actions, as Adam once more packs up to leave for God knows where. Is there any place left?

       A short while later Dynia overhears fellow workers speaking of the priest who they suggest is now living just a few kilometers away. “Humpty” leaps way from his job and literally runs off, leaving his family behind, catching a train to the village named by the workers. He arrives in a rainstorm, Adam inviting him in, undressing him, and joyfully giving in to his long withheld sexual desires.

       If he is a failed priest, he is now a splendid human who can love and share with another being.

Many critics describe what he does as wrong; but I would argue it is precisely the right decision. We need more loving human beings and perhaps less priests in the world.  

       Yet the movie doesn’t stop here. It returns us, quite unpredictably, to Adam’s divinity school days in a long tracking shot of young priests, some walking forward until they and the camera reach the closest vantage point where we see a group of young men engaged in conversation. As they continue, one turns away whom we recognize as Adam, now facing the camera as the others remain engaged with one another.

      Another Letterboxd commentator, Richmond Hill, argues:

 

“To understand the film you could skip to the last two scenes which square the sex and then ruin things by circling back to the seminarian sour grapes and another Damien-style glance to camera as the whole sorry saga is implied to start again.”

      I find this statement to represent an utter misunderstanding of the work. Adam stares out of the past at us not as an evil Omen-like Damien, but as someone different from the others, someone who will finally be able to face up to his true responsibilities to live a full loving life. It appears that the critics would doom him to the narrow-minded world in which he has grown up.

     This is a profoundly moving and actually hopeful film that demonstrates holiness does not always reveal itself in a priest’s or minister’s garb.

      I might suggest that what critic Michaelle da Silva argues at the end of her review in Georgia Straight—“You might find yourself cheering for Adam and Lukasz to get together, which may ultimately cause you to question your own morals.”—does not truly comprehend, at least, my notion of morality.

 

Los Angeles, May 3, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).