There’s not an ounce of sentimentality in Kieslowski’s “No End.” The director confronts us immediately with the death of a father, with candles in a graveyard, with the spectral images of a man lingering in the house of his family.

Hands dominate. It’s the first thing we see after the candles — the hand of a man, clenching and closing. We see a boy asleep on a bed, the hand reaching down towards him, never quite touching.

And then we see objects as Kieslowski loves to show … a bunch of Legos spread out on a table. The camera keeps panning up and to the left, past a piano, something else that requires the hands. Then to a pair of roller skates, moving to the feet, and finally to a completed Lego project of a family and a house.

This symbol of security and bliss has been shattered. But we next get a reminder of martial law Poland, to a recorded voice telling us that the line called is being monitored. It’s a time and temperature line, something that will return in Kieslowski’s final film, “Red.”

It’s 7:12 a.m., according to the recorded phone voice. We next see the reflection of the man in the windows of a bookcase. The music playing throughout is a dirge, written by the great Zbigniew Preisner in his first collaboration with Kieslowski. The music will be an essential element to the film, and this partnership will transform Kieslowski, a man who admitted he had no ear for music.

The man is now in his wife’s bedroom. She is asleep, he has his back to her, looking at the camera. He begins a monologue. It’s the only time we will hear him speak in the film. In it, he tells the story of his death, about how he waited in the car for his wife Ula and his son Jacek.

Kieslowski’s stories are filled with characters who died young of heart attacks and he is another. He expected pain that never arrived, just the fear of an attack. He witnessed his wife’s reaction from above, but observed it all with a sense of peace.

We then get a matter of fact line from him that is chilling the more you pull it apart. He notes that he had a feeling that he could have returned to his life at this time, but he chose not to, preferring to dwell in the weightless peace that he had entered.

It’s chilling, because he specifically says that he could have taken his son to school, but chose not to do so. Kieslowski then cuts away to a shot of Jacek crying. The man tells us, in the same matter of fact voice, that when the coffin closed, his son started to cry.

He then notes that Jacek’s hands were so cold they’d turned blue, but he was too self conscious to put them in his pockets. He notes that he went back home — arrived there before Ula and Jacek, and drops some details about the file to a legal case he was working on.

The last thing he tells us is that Ula and Jacek slept in the same bed, but Ula woke up in the night shivering and went back to her own room. Then the phone rings, wakes Ula, breaking the man’s narration.

Ula picks up the phone. It’s Tomek, a friend of her husband’s. He does not know that Antek is dead, she breaks the news to him then asks him to please call back later.

She absent-mindedly makes two coffees, then realizes her error and pours one out. She joins Jacek at the breakfast table. She asks him not to tell anyone at school that his father has died — which strikes me as cruel, it’s not something a 10 year old boy should have to carry around alone.

But he complies and asks her to be there when he gets home. She nods, but buries her face in her folded hands. She seems too wrapped up in grief to be fully present with him.

The phone rings and Ula answers it. It’s the wife of a legal client — the case her husband spoke about during his monologue. She’s asking for something frantically and Ula seems annoyed by the call. She signals Jacek — he gets up and goes to pick up the other line, pretending to be in another conversation to give the impression of crossed phone lines, something that used to happen with old technology, perhaps even moreso in the Eastern Blok. This gives her space to hang up the phone.

We get the sense in this scene that Ula and Jacek have a close, loving relationship. But it’s also impossible not to feel sad for Jacek right off the bat. His father told us that he chose to remain dead over being with his son — and we will soon see that his mother with hang onto her grief rather than face up to the responsibilities of caring fully for her son.