Zanussi's concern with questions of morality in a modern world has led him to create characters who, like himself, are trained in scientific thinking, but who struggle to exist in a world of emotions and, ultimately, to face the irrationality of death. The idealistic hero of The Constant Factor, Witold, (Tadeusz Bradecki) is a mathematician in search of a moral constant as pure and absolute as its mathematical counterpart, impervious to external manipulation. But manipulation is all that the hapless hero finds in the petty corruption that pervades modern Polish life, from the business world to the hospital where his mother waits dying in a drafty corridor until he can bribe her way into a room. Determined to resist complicity in a world devoid of true values, Witold loses his mother, his job and, finally, his innocence.