Episode 4 of The Dekalog requires a trigger warning. Well, arguably, every episode the series demands one. Episode one, if you’ve lost a child, will devastate you. Episode 2 features abortion and infidelity, issues that trigger many. Episode 3 features infidelity, again, plus a very odd scene that evokes the holocaust. There are episodes to come that feature a brutal murder, a peeping Tom, a kidnapped child and, if you’re a collector of stamps, a finale that might make you lose your mind.

But episode 4 dances around the issue of incest, making it particularly sensitive. Of course, there’s incest all throughout the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments does not include its prohibition. In modern terms, it feels bizarre that 10 rules for life were handed down and both rape (which by Gen Z standards, I’m supposed to detrigger by calling it grape) and incest were left off entirely.

So, in Kieslowski’s modern retelling of the Commandments, incest is in there. Sort of. Maybe. The episode is really about an unusual father-daughter relationship where the mother died at a very young age and the father was left to raise her alone. This is a surprisingly common story in the Kieslowski canon that he returns to explicitly in “The Double Life of Veronique” and in numerous one-off ways, with father figures to younger women in numerous films, including his final masterpiece “Three Colours: Red.”

Slavov Zizek, who has written extensively about Kieslowski, expressed contradictory opinions about this particular Kieslowski obsession. In his earlier writing, he noted (accurately) that Kieslowski collaborators, including actresses, felt he was a very loving, supportive director and that these plots accurately expressed the warmth and protection he held for the women on his sets — and in real life, because he had a strong relationship with his daughter. But recently, Zizek has claimed that after Kieslowski turned away from Poland and started making his European films, he became drunk with celebrity, cast extremely beautiful women in his lead roles and slept with all of them (he says he learned this from sometimes Kieslowski collaborator Agnieszka Holland.)

Personally, I don’t judge Kieslowski for this and I wonder just how much of Zizek’s moralism (unusual for him) is just jealousy. Anyway, if “Red” is the idealized Kieslowski telling of this animus tale — the older male with some vaguely expressed attraction for a younger woman, but who sticks to his role as a philosophical and moral guide — Episode 4 of “The Dekalog” is the haunted version. Here, there is a real father-daughter relationship that exists in playful warmth and affection … that is disrupted by a mysterious letter.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The episode begins with our dual protagonists, the father and daughter pair of Michal and Anka, starring into shades, longingly. This is a flash forward to later in the episode, or perhaps even post episode, where the two are pondering where their revealed feelings leave them. Kieslowski often employs flash forwards to give his films a sense of existing in memory, part of a reconstructed past. Kieslowski, a master of tone, likely employs the technique here to put us in a somber state of mind, perhaps fearing that the playful scenes that follow might set the wrong mood for the episode.

We next see Anka close a glass door, bright sunlight coming through, then slowly walk into the kitchen to fill a pitcher with water. She first goes into her father’s study and pulls aside a pile of papers to see an envelope underneath, one that has “to be opened after my death” written on top. The fact that she went right to the envelope makes us believe that she knew of this envelope and where to find it.

She next kneels next to her father in bed -- her face only a couple of inches from his -- an unsettling juxtaposition he will repeat in "The Double Life of Veronique." She kisses his cheek, then pours water on his head. As he screams, she hides behind a chair, a big smile on her face. He peers out, thinking she has gone, she then dashed over and yells Easter Monday as she pours the rest of the water on his head and dashes off. A footnote to the published screenplays says that this was a playful tradition in Poland for many years on the day after Easter.

Her father is not going to neglect his side of the tradition. He’s next seen creeping slowly towards the bathroom, carrying a pot filled with water. He knocks on the door and Anka tells him to go away. He pretends to need to use the bathroom and says he’s in a hurry. She makes him swear he doesn’t have water, but he ignores this and repeats that he’s in a hurry.

She opens the door and then backs up into the tub … he splashes her with water even though she told him she won’t have time to dry her hair before taking him to the airport.

Before we move on, I want to check in with the published screenplay again to note some differences in character descriptions than what we see on screen. The script describes Anka as being of medium build but with “oversized breasts.”. I guess the tryouts didn’t go quite as expected, because the actress cast in the role is quite waif like.

Meanwhile Michal, her father, is described as a thin man … but the role is filled with a more barrel chested middle aged man.

Anyway, after splashing his daughter with water, she’s standing in a tub in a long white dressing gown, now all wet and leaving much of her body exposed. Michal seems to give her a once over before leaving the bathroom and closing the door.

They are about to leave for the airport and the phone rings. Anka picks up the phone and asks Michal to hang up when she gets in her room. He picks up the receiver but listens in instead, even as Anka tells him to hang up … she even asks the boy on the line, her boyfriend Jarek, if she heard him hang up. He says he did. Anka then tells Jarek that there was a false alarm, she just got her period. Jarek asks if he should come along to the airport, but the scene cuts before we hear an answer.

We next see father and daughter at the airport in a sweet scene. He lets her know that he’s nervous to fly, she says he doesn’t like it when he goes away. He kissed her on the cheek and notes that her hair is still wet.

Before heading to his gate, he remembers something — he walks back to tell her he forgot to pay the rent and phone bill and asks her to do so. He says she can find them in the chest of drawers. She waves again. She then waits at an observation deck outside to watch him leave.

These kinds of passenger send offs don’t happen anymore. But we see Michal board a LOT bus to be taxied to his plane — this is something that still happens at the Warsaw airport, believe it or not. I experienced it twice last year.

Anka returns home and opens the drawers to find the bills. In the same drawer, she again sees the letter.

We next see her at an optometrist. The optometrist asks Anka about how she got into drama school, asking what poems she had to memorize for her audition. When she says Eliot was one, the optometrist replies that her son will never make it. Anka goes on to explain that she couldn’t see the plane take off the day before, so she wants her eyes checked out. She’s given an exam and is asked to pick out the letters F-A-T-H-E-R. Anka asked why those letters, the doctor says its an intelligence test as well.

So, through this very long, surprisingly complicated opening scene, we know that Anka has a father fixation, her father seems unusually attached to her, and there’s a secret letter waiting to reveal … something.