In telling the story of their journey together, Matuszyński mixes different genre patterns and tones – we will find in Minghun both a road movie and an atypical ‘bromance’ built around the characters of a fifty-year-old mourner and his Chinese father-in-law. The director of The Last Family is not afraid of ambiguity – he goes along with the black humour in Grzegorz Łoszewski’s script and offers a dialogue with Kieślowski and his cinematic spirituality. The film’s scriptwriter, in particular, fills it with references to his works: The Double Life of Veronique and Red. For example, he uses the motif of a letter from the afterlife (known, for example, from Decalogue IV), and at other times he also invokes the name Van den Budenmayer, the artistic pseudonym of Zbigniew Preisner, the composer of music for the films of the director of Blind Chance. Following in the footsteps of Kieślowski, the scriptwriter poses questions to which there are no easy answers.
Minghun is just that – a story about the search for meaning. A painful, often hopeless one, because it is realised, as it were, in spite of oneself. Sceptical towards the idea of an afterlife, Marcin Dorociński’s character says in one scene (in the words of a song by the band Raz, Swa, Trzy) that it is ‘difficult not to believe in anything’. That is why he tries to find faith in eternity, in culture, which is supposed to tame the pain of loss, in ritual as a mechanism of passing, and finally – in another human being.
