Dekalog 7 has a very interesting premise. It’s an unusual twist on child abduction stories. It is extremely well cast — right down to the little girl looking very much like young man cast as her father.

And yet — the episode doesn’t live up to its potential. Kieslowski is usually an extremely economical filmmaker, but this section of the story drags significantly. We’re given a backstory, which we need, but it’s lacking the passion we might expect. It just feels like being briefed on where we are in the plot instead of feeling it.

With the exception of a very short scene where Ewa comes home crying and Stefan seems to have no reaction to it, this segment focuses on Majka and Anya. We see them taking a train ride with each other, then walking through a forest, where they come across the manual carousel that Anya rides. As she is circling around on her horse, she asks Majda — with a smile on her face — if she has been kidnapped.

Majka then gives her the truth everyone has been hiding from her — that Ewa is not her real mother, Anya is. The girl doesn’t seem to react to this much. Kieslowski was dealing here with a very young actress — she can’t be more than five — and her greatest asset is her big blue eyes. But she’s not asked to do much here and the script doesn’t give her much to do.

They finally arrive at a house in the forest. There, they meet Anya’s father, a man in his late 20s named Wojtek (I only know this from the published screenplay — we don’t hear his name in this segment.) There’s some odd vibe between Wojtek and Majka — some hostility coming from him, perhaps a desire to restart something coming from her.

We find out that he was once a teacher and a writer — Majka seems to have admired him for this. Now he makes stuffed animals and the house is brimming with them, which appeals to Anya, and she immediately curls up with a big pink bear and takes a nap.

This is convenient, because they can now have a conversation without her overhearing stuff a little girl shouldn’t — such as the fact that Wojtek was Majka’s Polish literature teacher and she fell in love with him when she was 16, which was when Anya was conceived. And yet, he seems to be carrying the grievance here, as if she was responsible for ruining his life.

The conversation between them will continue, but I’m going to stop her and pick up more of it tomorrow. Even though I am not a fan of melodrama, I think this scene could have used just a taste of it — some more heat between the two characters could have gone a long way. Instead we’re left with this odd sense that Majka was somehow in the wrong for sleeping with her teacher and we’re back in the same skewed moral universe which weighed down episode 6.