The Ten Commandments, exact and uncompromising, literally cast in stone, continues to provide a source of moral conflict in contemporary society. In the ten part collection of films, The Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieślowski examines the dilemma of fundamental sin in the lives of ordinary Warsaw citizens.

Polish immigrant Karol Karol finds himself out of a marriage, a job and a country when his French wife, Dominique, divorces him after six months due to his impotence. Forced to leave France after losing the business they jointly owned, Karol enlists fellow Polish expatriate Mikołaj to smuggle him back to their homeland.

A young man is confronted with corrupt and vindictive colleagues at work and negligent officials at the hospital where his mother is dying. As he searches quixotically for a steadfast moral code by which to live, he suffers from the knowledge of human frailty and our darker inclinations to do harm.

Set in London, the story revolves around Maximatic, a company specializing in mathematical and computer-based methods for increasing client profits. Its owner, Jonathan Everett, struggles financially when his partner decides to risk a significant sum of money, believing that data analysis and probability can predict the outcomes of games of chance. As events unfold, the seemingly rational project develops into a dangerous obsession, and the search for the mathematical formula for winning leads to a series of dramatic events, including a double murder. The play combines a classic whodunit plot with a reflection on the boundaries of science, chance, and human greed.

In this adaptation of an historical play by Pope John Paul II, painter Albert Chmielowski decides to devote his life to helping the homeless.

Dorota Geller, a married woman, faces a dilemma involving her sick husband's prognosis. Her husband's doctor, who believes in God, sweared about it in vain.

A moral conflict between a young assistant and an associate professor arises during a university linguistics camp.

A rational young man and his devoutly Catholic wife believe their sickly son may have leukemia. As they await further tests over a weekend they both struggle with a crisis of faith in both science and Catholicism.

In what appears to be an inexplicable incident, a man drives up to a resort hotel in midwinter, throws away his car keys, enters, and proceeds to agitate everyone he meets with his urgency -- a message he is somehow unable to communicate. Then he leaves, disappearing in the snow. Later, the people he appeared to have upset have gathered to search for him and find him frostbitten, but alive. Visiting him at the sanatorium to which he has been taken, they gradually discover what was really happening.