The Third Part of the Night

In the early days of the occupation, Nazi soldiers slaughter Michał's wife, his child, and his mother at their villa. Michał and his father manage to survive by fleeing into a nearby forest, from which they watch the killings unfold.

After the massacre, Michał resolves to join the resistance, seeking purpose amid the occupation. Before he can make his first contact, the Gestapo executes his go-between and chases him through the town.

Michał hides in the apartment of a pregnant woman and helps her give birth. The newborn's mother seems a haunting doppelgänger of his murdered wife, fueling his sense of haunted repetition.

On the street, Michał speaks with a group of nuns about existence and the cruel reality of occupation. The nuns offer a stark, practical view of mortality, forcing him to confront what ‘meaning’ still means in this world.

Michał wanders the occupied city and witnesses a German officer beat a man at the market, demonstrating the regime's cruelty. Marian kneels at the body and laments the loss of meaning, then agrees to push for Michał's additional rations.

Michał takes a job in the typhus center's lice-feeding labs and is approved as a guinea pig for vaccines. He receives his first injection and an illegal vaccine, telling himself it is for his wife and child, knowing the previous patient died.

Back at the apartment where the woman with her baby lives, he delivers vaccines and food. A nun advises him not to hoard for himself, and Michał debates whether the woman resembles his wife.

Later, a mysterious masked man visits Michał in bed and speaks of prewar deals and a prophecy that Michał must find the woman he loved again. He reveals he is Mr. Rosencranc, wears a mask to hide his face, and leaves him a book marked with visionary pages.

The masked man walks through a graveyard, removes his mask, and shows documents to an old lady who is then dragged away by SD or Gestapo agents. The man is shot, and Michał witnesses the brutal roundup from a window.

Michał speaks with his father, who claims he has never heard of that man and insists the world has vanished, urging Michał to adapt to the new laws of decay. Michał insists he can redeem what he did, including the fate of their children.

Back at the hospital lab, Michał sees his wife again in the form of a nurse, then confronts a dying patient. He and other patients debate philosophers like Nietzsche, Spengler, Balzac and Proust as memories of professors fade away.

The toy horse reappears in a dark corner, and a boy tells Michał that there is no ‘you and me’ anymore. On a nocturnal mission for a friend, Michał witnesses a man being shot and begins to sense the war's blurring line between dream and reality.

In a brutal sequence, Michał is drawn into a hospital nightmare of mistaken identity, collapses through a corridor of Gestapo cells, and stumbles back to his villa to find his family dead. A woman recites a verse about death as the four horsemen of the apocalypse stand outside the window.