Movies Like THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT

Andrzej Zulawski’s masterful fever dream The Third Part of the Night is an elliptical wonder on par with the most mind-stretching intellectual Moebius strips of Tarkovsky and David Lynch. Based on the real-life experiences of Zulawski’s father during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the film follows a fugitive who, after witnessing the murder of his wife and child, is hurled into a life that literally is not his own. Littered with trapdoors, doubles, and wormholes, Zulawski creates a cinematic world on the verge of collapse, where doppelgangers and dread abound alongside the true untold story of a Nazi vaccine laboratory, where Jews and members of the resistance were “employed” as feeders for parasites infected with typhus (thus protecting them from persecution.) It’s a history that’s mind-bogglingly fascinating on its own; in Zulawski’s hands, it’s one of the most unique war films ever created. — The Cinefamily