My Big Fat Polish Wedding? Thankfully not. Feature-debutante Wojciech Smarzowski manages to take one of the most hackneyed sub-genres in cinema—comically chaotic nuptials—and produce something delightfully scabrous, bracingly misanthropic, uncompromisingly intense. It’s the wedding day from hell: though the ceremony itself passes with only a slight hitch, the problems start as soon as the reception gets under way in a hired community hall. There are no real innocents on view, but chief among sinners is Wojnar (Marian Dziedziel), the harassed, sixty-ish father of beautiful, blonde bride Kasia (Tamara Arciuch). Businessman Wojnar is a thoroughly immoral, palm-greasing rogue who receives a comeuppance of an appropriately extreme kind. All the participants seem to be on the take and/or the make, from crooked lawyer to feckless police to bullnecked mafia heavies to the emphatically less-than-pious local priest (who has the nerve to warm that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’ during the service).

This is pitch-black satire, a comedy of riotous, debauched, gleeful excess, carefully observing classical dramatic unites of geography and chronology. But The Wedding isn’t just a catalogue of calamity and cynicism: Smarzowski smoothly builds up to an unexpectedly romantic and optimistic finale—one so very hard-won that it feels anything but sentimental.—Neil Young.