A serious man tries to avoid catching a deadly laughing plague in a growingly polarized and dystopian society.

After an exotic bird arrives from Sardinia to a US port, a serious Polish-American man called Ryszard notices his work colleagues stricken with uncontrollable laughter – despite finding himself immune. With news arising that a contagion disrupting nerve signaling and causing fatal laughter is spreading around the globe, Ryszard tries his best to protect his unruly immigrant father and jovial wife, all the while trying to survive in an increasingly dystopian and glum society.

Director’s Vision for ‘Sardinia’

One morning on the Warsaw Metro I witnessed a woman reading a book, chuckling to herself. Her contagious giggle spread to other passengers, each soon laughing in their unique ways. Some couldn’t stop, doubling over in pain; others seemed annoyed at the histrionic distraction; a few even looked afraid. The scene felt surreal — ripping a cross-section of strangers out of their humdrum commutes, and briefly connecting them with something primal, and absurd.

I forgot about the incident until deep into the pandemic, when the anxiety and paranoia around COVID-19 were giving way to burnout and societal polarization. While in a small London shop, I remember watching an unmasked person’s coughing fit trigger various reactions from passersby — from apathy, to nasty looks, to people scuttling away in terror.

Something fused in my subconscious: what if laughter, and in a larger sense happiness, were somehow the viral, deadly elements of a worldwide plague? How would things devolve on a societal and psychological level? Would only the sad survive? Personally, the pandemic filled me with existential dread, with stretches feeling like a nightmarish fever dream (a phrase I’d mostly use to describe the tone of my favorite films). And so it seemed a fruitful paradox to build a film around…

Truth soon proved stranger than fiction. My research led to mass psychogenic illnesses like the 1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic, and diseases evoking pathological laughing including gelastic seizures and the pseudobulbar affect. I read of pre-Roman Sardinia’s ritual use of the sardonion plant, which induced deadly convulsions resembling giggling, and inspired Homer to coin the word “sardonic” in The Odyssey — which also spawned my film’s title and contagion’s origin.

To create tension in my fictional world, I wanted a protagonist so fearful and melancholic he’d be most immune — whilst also, deep down, needing to laugh more than anyone. And so our sympathetic hero, Ryszard Przybyszewski, was born: an insurance underwriter with a demented father, dead mother, failing marriage and sadistic workplace. I drew from my Polish roots, making him the son of immigrants.

I also wanted to engage the audience as viscerally as possible: to infect viewers with laughter, as if by collective contagion — but then quickly blur the lines, and push them into more discomforting, interesting territory. I thought often of Chekhov plays, written with comedy in mind, but acted and directed as heartbreaking tragedy. I grounded actors’ performances, never playing for laughs, and worked with department heads to build as natural a world as possible, to keep the horror real.

To keep viewers immersed in a pervasive dread, I opted for carefully-orchestrated images and sounds: purposefully-framed wides mixed with probing, intimate close-ups and inserts; zooms and slow-motion to dislocate key moments; sparse dialogue; a heightened sound design, and a score blending percussive, atonal horror with baroque elegance.

My hope is viewers are entertained by the film’s satirical elements, and perhaps even reflect on the surreality of the global pandemic — which to me often feels as if it passed like some semi-forgotten dream. In a broader sense, though, I’d like audiences to participate in a lonely man’s journey from crippling fear to a newfound freedom — witnessing him ultimately give up control, let go, and laugh in the face of dread — something I myself had to learn to do during the pandemic.