The Altar Boys (2025) review: four boys bug a confessional — and Poland's biggest film prize followed
Piotr Domalewski's film puts four teenage altar servers, one wired confessional and a set of Zorro masks in the same suburban parish. It took the Golden Lions at Gdynia's fiftieth edition and carried on winning after that.
Four boys in cassocks, a listening device taped inside a confessional, and a scheme that begins as charity. Poland's most important festival handed it the top prize on its fiftieth birthday.
Ministranci — released internationally as The Altar Boys — is Piotr Domalewski's feature, written and directed, running 110 minutes and released in Polish cinemas on 21 November 2025. It was produced by Aurum Film with the Mazovian Culture Institute and the Mazovia and Warsaw Film Fund, distributed by Next Film, and backed by the Polish Film Institute and Creative Europe MEDIA. Piotr Sobociński Jr shot it, Agnieszka Glińska cut it, Wojciech Urbański scored it.
The premise does most of the heavy lifting
Filip Grabowski (Tobiasz Wajda) and three friends serve at the altar in a small town and perform Christian rap on the side. When they work out that money collected for the poor has been going elsewhere within the archdiocese, they decide to run the redistribution themselves — lifting cash from the collection and handing it to people who need it.
The problem is identifying those people, which is where the confessional comes in. The boys wire it, listen to the parish confess, and use what they hear to sort the deserving from the sinful. Then they put on Zorro masks and start dispensing verdicts.
It's a premise that would collapse into farce in most hands. The joke is that the machinery works — the boys have better intelligence on their town than anyone else in it.
What Domalewski does with it
He plays it straight, which is the correct decision. The film tracks Filip drifting from vigilante to something closer to self-appointed judge, and it keeps the comedy and the dread running on the same rail rather than alternating between them.
Cineuropa's Fabien Lemercier, reviewing it in November 2025 after the Arras premiere, was direct about where it lands.
The film is "a hymn on the complexities of good and bad", Lemercier wrote, praising Domalewski's "masterful mise en scène" and comparing it to Kirill Serebrennikov's The Student.
The ensemble carries it. All four leads are effectively unknowns, and Domalewski shoots them like a documentary crew that got lucky, while a supporting bench of Sławomir Orzechowski, Tomasz Schuchardt and Kamila Urzędowska works the adult half of the town.
The awards run
Gdynia's fiftieth edition closed on 27 September 2025 and gave the film four prizes:
- The Golden Lions — the festival's grand prize, ahead of Agnieszka Holland's Franz, which took the Silver.
- The Audience Award — the same crowd that had just watched a film about a bugged confessional.
- Best Screenplay — Domalewski.
- Best Editing — Agnieszka Glińska.
It then took nine nominations at the 2026 Polish Film Awards on 9 March, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Sound and Best Supporting Actor for Orzechowski. It converted two: Best Screenplay again, and the Audience Award again.
Worth your time?
Yes, with one caveat: the film is more interested in the mechanism than in resolving it, and viewers who want the moral accounts balanced by the final reel will not get that. What they will get is a tightly built comedy that keeps finding new ways for a good idea to curdle, four performances from boys who had barely acted before, and Sobociński Jr photographing a Polish suburb like it matters.
For the record: the Golden Lions, the Gdynia audience vote and the national Audience Award all went the same way. Polish juries and Polish crowds agreeing on anything is the rarer result here.