Kanal is a grim, hallucinating picture of the last days of the Polish Resistance in Warsaw. Much of the film takes place in the city sewers, where the survivors of a partisan platoon take to in order to attempt to retreat to the city's center. Like its predecessor in Wajda's trilogy of a disillusioned wartime experience, A Generation, Kanal conveys a tragic, ironic sense of the purity, heroism, and love which characterized the actions of the men and women trapped in the (real and symbolic) labyrinth of Poland's underground Resistance.