In an attempt to resolve various present-day problems, Tadeusz (Jan Kreczmar) searches obsessively for his son Jędrek, missing since WWII and probably dead, the “codes” of the title referring to tiny scraps of sometimes conflicting information gleaned from possibly unreliable witnesses, which Tadeusz tries to patch into a coherent portrait. But this obsessive quest merely alienates him further from his wife and surviving son, the latter played by Zbigniew Cybulski as a man wrestling with his own WWII-era demons. As ever in Wojciech Has’s films, the past is a strange and forbidding era, with which we can never fully come to terms.
