Tell Me What You Feel (PL,2026)
(Powiedz mi, co czujesz):
A Romantic Comedy for People Who Pretend They Don't Believe in Romance
We have optimized everything except our emotional lives.
Our phones unlock by looking at our faces.
Dating apps can locate a soulmate within 300 meters.
Spotify knows we're about to have a nervous breakdown before we do.
And yet we still can't answer the oldest question in human history: "So... what are we?"
Tell Me What You Feel doesn't answer it either, thankfully.
Instead, it does something much rarer: it admits the question is infinitely more interesting than the answer.
The writers, Agata K. Koschmieder and Łukasz Ronduda, have written a beautiful story about two people who meet and feel an undeniable connection.
You follow them as they try to understand what that connection actually is and what survives once attraction collides with family, friends, trauma, expectations, everyday boredom and the general chaos of being alive.
On paper, almost nothing happens.
On screen, everything does.
It's a film built almost entirely out of things Hollywood usually edits out: hesitations, glances, bad timing, conversations that begin nowhere and end somewhere unexpectedly important.
Nobody saves the world.
They are too busy trying not to misunderstand each other.
Which, frankly, is already a full-time job.
The miracle of Tell Me What You Feel is that it never tries to convince you it's authentic. It simply is.
Nobody behaves like they're auditioning for a viral quote on Instagram. Nobody gives TED Talks disguised as dialogue.
These characters don't seem aware they're in a movie, which nowadays feels almost avant-garde.
Luxury has changed.
Twenty years ago luxury meant champagne, a Ferrari and a room overlooking the Mediterranean.
Today it's finding someone who actually lets you finish a sentence.
And then there is Jan Sałasiński.
Film festivals love announcing "the discovery of the year." Usually that means an actor with spectacular cheekbones and an excellent publicist.
This time they may have accidentally discovered an actual actor.
Jan Sałasiński has that increasingly rare quality: he never seems to perform. He simply exists.
Watching him feels less like watching an actor than eyes dropping on somebody's inner life.
He's funny without trying to be funny, vulnerable without advertising his vulnerability, and charismatic without ever looking aware of it.
There is something almost otherworldly about him. As if an angel had accidentally missed its connecting flight somewhere above Warsaw and decided to stay for a while.
Thankfully, someone handed him a script instead of a return ticket.
The remarkable thing is that he makes sincerity look effortless. In 2026, that may be the boldest special effect in cinema.
Watching him, I found myself wondering where these young people had gone.
Not young people as a marketing category.
Young people as a state of mind.
The ones who could be romantic without apologizing for it.
Curious without showing off.
Free without turning freedom into a personal brand.
People who still believed another human being might be more interesting than their own online profile.
Perhaps they still exist.
Perhaps they're simply too busy living to post about it.
What moved me most wasn't nostalgia for my own youth—that would be giving my twenties far too much credit—but nostalgia for the possibility of youth itself.
That intoxicating belief that every conversation might alter the course of your life.
That love isn't content.
It's an interruption.
That's what this film understands so beautifully.
Its realism isn't cynical, which is surprisingly rare these days.
It remembers that ordinary people are already contradictory enough.
They don't need screenwriters making them quirkier, cooler or more broken.
Ronduda and Koschmieder trust their characters enough to let them be inconsistent, confused, generous and selfish—sometimes all before lunch.
When the lights came up, I experienced a sensation that has become strangely unfamiliar.
I wanted to talk to people.
Not network.
Not optimize.
Not check my phone.
Just... talk.
Maybe that's the greatest compliment I can pay Tell Me What You Feel. It doesn't leave you wanting another film.
It leaves you wanting another life.
Or at least another first date.
Preferably one without Wi-Fi.
By Giulia Dobre
Eurocinema Subotica
Palic European Film Festival
July 2026
#jansalasinski
#polishfilm
#lukaszronduda
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