Imagine Alejandro Jodorowsky's surrealism mixed with the broad scope of Shakespearean tragedy and you might get something resembling Andrzej Zulawski's The Devil; a cult film in search of a cult.  What begins as a vicious and violent, yet seemingly simplistic, condemnation of war, slowly grows into something otherworldly with far bigger concerns.  After being saved by a mysterious man who follows him for the rest of the film, Jakub (Leszek Teleszynski) returns home from war with the hope of finding his country better off, but instead is greeted with confusion, disdain and eventually, outright insanity.  His friends had heard he was dead and now found his presence insulting as it disrupts their reality apart from the horrors of the war.  Jakub continues his aimless journey throughout the countryside with the mysterious stranger and the nun they also saved and witness countless acts of cruelty and a society without direction or meaning

Zulawski envisions a world driven mad by greed, lust, envy and violence, where the atrocities of the battlefield are imprinted in the minds and on the faces of every individual.   His outward expression of these worst of human traits is mirrored in the appropriately over-the-top direction, with its abundance of handheld and 360-degree spiraling shots, along with the actors disturbing facial contortions and theatrical gestures.  Through Jakub's surreal, circular journey, which takes him through various seasons and landscapes yet seemingly never very far from his home town, he discovers not only that he fought for nothing, but that the world he left behind has devolved beyond repair and people are left only to fulfill their basest desires in the most vulgar and despicable of ways.  Finding his father dead, his mother working as a prostitute, his girlfriend pregnant by his friend and his sister constantly beaten, Jakub finally gives in to the wishes of his saviour, who by now has revealed himself as something quite different, and succumbs to the depravity surrounding him.  Zulawski links the theatrical to these horrific acts - a notion embodied by the traveling troupe which Jakub encounters throughout his travels - making his transition from soldier to murderer a conscious decision to engage in what has become an almost alternate reality.  It's a truly uncompromising vision of Hell on Earth.