Something about “No End” feels off to me. Grief is supposed to be a central theme of the movie, and Ula definitely goes through the motions of ruminating on her dead husband and looking back at some details of his death. But it all feels clinical, at a distance.

Later, Kieslowski will show us grief in many forms that feel deeply genuine. But so far in this movie, it feels more like curiosity and discovery than loss.

Jacek comes into a study that Ula is cleaning out and catches her holding the phone, but not talking to anyone. He asks who she is talking to, she says no one, that she intended to call someone, but then forgot. We get a little narrative movement in this scene — Jacek letting Ula now that Labrador has called about the case file — but not much else.

Ula now goes about looking through her husband’s possessions. She comes across $200 US in a book. There’s an amusing bit, where she comes across a number of Dunlap stickers, then finds her husband’s tennis racket and sees that he affixed Dunlap tape on top of the Polish branding on the racquet, to make it look more respectable.

Then she comes across a letter, sealed with heavy tape. There are pictures of a nude woman inside, with the face of the woman cut out in all the pictures. Ula gets upset and tears up all of the pictures.

We see the black dog sitting outside the apartment. I suppose Antek no longer needs to show his face, the dog has become the surrogate.

In the next scene, with her husband’s old friend Tomek, she details some guilt about making Antek wait in the car and the thought that if she’d come out sooner she might have saved his life.

Tomek brushes that aside, which is fine, but then he seems to brush aside all of her grief, telling her to stop thinking about it, that she’s still young and has a successful translating career in her own right. He also says that things weren’t great between them at the end, which feels to me far too much like someone telling the plot instead of showing it.

She agrees with that point, but then says that now that he’s gone, she feels that maybe things were better than she thought. His response to that is to sigh and say “but now he’s gone.” What a bizarre, cold scene.

She then goes into the matter of the nude photos, which Tomek says Antek knew about and told him, although he never saw the pictures himself. She tries to explain how she wasn’t making much money as a tour guide at the time.

It seems like Kieslowski was setting up this subplot to have some kind of meaning, but then gave up on it. He does that in a lot of his films. Here, it just seems to add bloat to the beginning of the film, it doesn’t take us anywhere.

We now cut back to the legal file, which Tomek is looking through before Ula turns it over. Tomek finds a hidden note attached to a paper clip. The inmate sent a personalized note to Antek that agrees to his legal strategy.

This, by the way, is perhaps a bit too subtle for someone outside of Poland to understand. The strike involves a non-Solidarity union, which apparently made it forbidden. But the legal strategy involved steering clear of politics … and the strike was said to be about settling some personal score, not taking on the government.

It’s all very convoluted and perhaps necessary to get the movie past the censors. But it also makes the entire political prosecution narrative a huge muddle and it will only get murkier as the film progresses.

She tells Tomek that Labrador has taken the case — which surprises him. He then finds a big red question mark by Labrador’s name in a legal directory and doesn’t know how it got there.

The movie cuts to the school yard, where Ula confronts Jacek about whether he placed the question mark. He denies it and she at first accuses him of lying, but then takes his word that he had nothing to do with it.

The segment ends with Jacek finding the black dog again and petting it.

Ok, I have to admit, I’m not really enjoying this — it’s no fun to work through a second-rate Kieslowski film, and so far, “No Exit” isn’t a movie that bears close examination.