“Burning Bush,” the 2014 movie by the legendary Polish film director and Solidarity activist Agnieszka Holland, was one of the most important cultural events in Central Europe in recent years. An ethical thriller, the film is set in 1969, soon after a Czech student named Jan Palach set himself on fire to protest the Soviet Union’s occupation of his country and draw attention to the authorities’ attempts to normalize Czechoslovak life afterward. Palach’s aim, it seems, was to put a screeching halt to evil’s banalization.

Three years after the film’s release, in the late afternoon of Oct. 19, Piotr Szczesny, a 54-year-old father of two, set himself on fire in front of the Communist-era Palace of Culture in Warsaw. Mr. Szczesny’s outcry was aimed against the far-right policies of the ruling Law and Justice Party, which he believed represented a mortal danger to Poland’s democracy. In a leaflet that he seems to have distributed before his suicide, he was unflinching: “I love freedom first and that is why I decided to immolate myself, and I hope that my death will shake the consciences of many people.”

I don’t know if Piotr Szczesny ever watched “Burning Bush,” but his act undoubtedly echoes Jan Palach’s sacrifice almost a half-century earlier.

Mr. Szczesny’s self-immolation provoked heated arguments in Poland. Some interpreted his suicide as more the result of depression than politics. Others feared that Poland could face a wave of copycat suicides and recommended that the news media ignore the shocking deed. And there were those, like Agnieszka Holland herself, who were ready to hail Mr. Szczesny as the true successor of Palach, and his gesture as a desperate undertaking to make Poles aware of the gravity of the current situation.