“The action develops over a few days in the gloomy atmosphere of a windy and misty December and on a cold and snowy Christmas Eve from which the title of the film is derived. It shows a strange rivalry, full of tension, between the father, a police inspector, who irrationally blames his son for the premature death of his wife, and the son, who has been missing his mother from his early childhood and who is yearning for his father's understanding and tenderness. This conflict, painful and cruel, is further endangered by outside circumstances: there is a degenerate child-murderer loose in the town.... Both Tadeusz Chmielewski and Jerzy Stawicki, the director of photography, have enveloped the story in a gloomy, wintry atmosphere, with badly lit alleys, squares and streets along ice-bound canals and have hidden the murders among old trees and abandoned barges, with some shady characters lurking in the town that is living under the terror of the recurrent and savage crimes.”