Andrzej Żuławski was born in Lwów, Poland on November 22, 1940. The cosmopolitan city had already been laid low by the ruthless mass murder of its intellectuals and professionals by the Soviets who'd invaded the prior year. Within another year, Lwów was seized by the Nazis who inflicted their own brand of sadism sending many of the remaining intellectuals and professionals to concentration camps. Two years later, Lwów was retaken by the Soviets and permanently annexed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic; its remaining ethnic Polish residents were forcibly relocated to German territory granted to Poland.

During the periods of wartime Soviet and Nazi occupation of Lwów, Andrzej Żuławski's father Miroslaw Żuławski was one of the lucky Polish intellectuals who survived the war by finding work at the Rudolf Weigl Institute which manufactured typhus vaccine using typhus-infected lice. Miroslaw's job entailed allowing the lice to feed upon his blood. This was done by attaching large colonies of the parasites directly to his legs. When not occupied with this, Miroslaw engaged in partisan conspiracies against the occupiers. It's these autobiographical details which form the storyline of The Third Part of the Night.

Early in the film, Michal (Leszek Teleszynski) sees his wife and son killed by German soldiers. Following this trauma, he is nearly killed himself when pursued by Gestapo agents through the streets of Lwów. In a scene that is the apex of the film's early tension and a crucial element to the film's resolution, Michal is saved when the Gestapo agents kill another man they've apparently mistaken for him.

In his escape from the Gestapo, Michal comes upon Marta (Malgorzata Braunek), a woman who appears to be a doppelgänger for his dead wife, at least in Michal's eyes though others apparently don't see her as he does. Michal helps deliver Marta's son, and he provides them food and shelter by working as a lice feeder. Michal carries on an affair with Marta while also searching for her missing husband and engaging in partisan activities as the situation in the city becomes ever more grim and chaotic.

Graphic documentary footage of natural childbirth and the infection of lice with typhus are interweaved into the fiction and serve along with horrific, freakish, and surreal fictions to create a disquieting effect. Michal goes mad, and with his loss of reason the viewers too are set adrift with no means to distinguish reality from delusion: Michal's dead wife and child make frequent appearances, a menagerie of freaks appear in the Institute's basement, people are routinely murdered in the streets, many more are rounded up and put on trucks, and all the while Michal goes about trying to aid Marta and find her husband culminating in a dizzying discovering that recursively returns to his near-death escape from the Gestapo.

Presentation
This review is of the European PAL-format release of The Third Part of the Night from the UK-based boutique DVD label Second Run. This is the only DVD release of The Third Part of the Night with English subtitles of which I'm aware.

Video:
The Third Part of the Night is presented in 1.66:1 letterbox with a digitally-restored, progressive transfer on a dual-layered DVD. There is some evidence of mild print damage, but the transfer generally looks very good. The colors are rather dark and cool, but uniformly so, and likely solely attributable to the director's intention.

Audio:
This release is presented in a restored mono which is directed to the left and right front speakers. Audio quality is generally very good though there appears frequently to be less than perfect sync between the audio and image though this could well be attributable to the use of ADR by Żuławski.

Optional English subtitles accompanying the original Polish audio are well translated, and appropriately sized, paced, and placed.

Extras:
Extras on this release consist of a booklet featuring an essay by Daniel Bird, and a newly-recorded 21-minute interview by Bird with Andrzej Żuławski in which Żuławski describes his start in filmmaking, details surrounding this film, and his views on filmmaking and life more generally.

Final Thoughts:
Andrzej Żuławski's The Third Part of the Night is not for everyone. Though I enjoy the psychologically unsettling fictions of Joseph Losey's Mr. Klein and Michael Haneke's The Castle (Das Schloß), the appeal of the physical horrors of Cronenberg and his ilk are generally lost on me. So while I found The Third Part of the Night only partially satisfying, the film is recommended for fans of this style of cult horror. In sum, if you enjoyed Żuławski's Possession or the horror films of David Cronenberg, you'll probably like this too.