Earlier this year, Polish director Andrzej Zulawski passed to the other side after a long battle with cancer. He became a shade at age 75. And his last film, Cosmos, happened to be about the very thing cancer took away from him, life. The movie asks the questions humans are condemned to ask forever: Does life have a purpose? Does it have a designer? Or is it all just an accident?

The investigation into this huge mystery begins with a young man, a handsome law student (Jonathan Genet), coming across a little bird that appears to have been hung to death. The mystery about the bird indicates to the young man a connection with the larger mystery about life and its origin. But the more the student becomes fixated with the bird's death, the crazier the film gets. (Cosmos is, after all, based on a book by the master of the metaphysical mystery novel, Witold Gombrowicz.)

Watch it to initiate yourself into the work of Zulawski, a fascinating filmmaker best known for one of the greatest films of the 1980s (Possession) and a long, strange filmography—Cosmos was his first movie in 15 years—well worth investigating.