Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Hound’s Hill’ follows the story of a novelist, Mikolaj Glowacki, who returns home after many years. He has a fractured relationship with his family, which he has no hopes of mending. He comes to his hometown to celebrate his father’s birthday, but several other things crop up, especially relating to the murder, which keeps Mikolaj within the confines of the town. The more time he spends there, the worse his mental health gets, and he finds himself drowning in a spiral he barely came out of the last time. The town also poses other challenges, and with all the things going on there, it becomes a character in itself. The story is made more impactful by the realistic depiction of things and events, and the town of Zybork plays an important role in all of it.
Zybork is a Real Polish Town But Represents Much More Than That in Hound’s Hill
‘Hound’s Hill’ is a fictional tale penned by Jakub Zulczyk. The author used Zybork as a setting for his novel to transport the audience to the claustrophobia of a small town that doesn’t let you go no matter how much you try to escape it. There is a real Polish town of the same name, which is now known as Jeziorany, in the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship. With around three thousand inhabitants, it is a quaint town with a lot going on within itself.
Zulczyk hails from Szczytno, which falls in the same district and is quite close to the real-life Zybork. It is fair to assume that he was looking at Zybork, aka Jeziorany when he was writing the story. However, he has also pointed out that the Zybork is greatly different from the real-life town. To drive the point home, the show was even filmed in Jeziorany to bring a sense of realism to the story, though it must be noted that the crime and bloodshed in the show do not entirely reflect the town and its people.
The main purpose of setting the story in a small town is to put the protagonist in a dark place that he cannot run away from. Zulczyk built Mikolaj’s hometown in the same tone as David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’ and wanted the audience to feel a sense of death and dread within its confines. He also called the book a highly personal project and drew from his own experience of living in a small Polish town to create the narrative for Mikolaj. At the same time, he also wanted to focus on the neglect that small towns like these have received over the years and how rampant corruption has kept them from achieving their true potential. Through this, he intended to represent all towns like Zybork rather than restrict all the bad things to one place.
Another thing that the author wanted to highlight through the small-town setting was to show that people never really change, not until they actively work towards it. With Mikolaj, he focuses on the psyche of someone who has grown up in a small town and left it because he wanted to change his ways, especially after experiencing a tragedy that changed him completely. With his return to Zybork, the focus was on how easy it is for people to fall back into the cycles that they barely broke out of the last time. In some ways, it was a reflection of Zulczyk’s own journey, which he brought out in Mikolaj’s narrative. The setting in Zybork allowed him to tap into that familiarity that he hoped would resonate with the audience as well.
Read More: Hound’s Hill: Who is the Woman in Black?
