Oskar Schindler pales next to In Darkness's Poldek (Robert Wieckiewicz), who attempts to save a group of Polish Jews in the Lovov ghetto from the Nazis. He could have gotten 500 zlotys a head for them. The path through the sewers provides the figurative death march for all Jews oppressed in the Holocaust.
Not only are the circumstances in the sewer foul and deadly, with offal, bodies, and vermin constant companions, but also the madness of the darkness becomes almost too much to bear. Director Agnieszka Holland manages to create a claustrophobic effect as if we all were journeying in a garbage submarine. (A similar effect is in Das Boot.) Yet, figurative light shines through Poldek's anti-Semitic eyes as the once amoral profiteer becomes a reluctant but generous benefactor to the almost totally helpless Jews. His unheroic visage and his base life of tending to the sewers while profiteering from the lost add to his remarkably Christian acts under the guise of business. The Jews are transformed as well by shedding their prejudices about Poldek.
When the allies liberate those homeless ones, the figurative light returns in all its glory. Although this Holocaust story repeats some common tropes about the genre, this film goes further to explore the deadening world the Jews had to inhabit in order to survive. The film's episodic rather than thematic approach, its narrative reliant on discreet occurrences rather than seamless story, makes its over two hours overly long.
In Darkness is a powerful statement on man's inhumanity to man and the filmmaker's genius recreating one of the the most difficult stories to tell anymore.
Not only are the circumstances in the sewer foul and deadly, with offal, bodies, and vermin constant companions, but also the madness of the darkness becomes almost too much to bear. Director Agnieszka Holland manages to create a claustrophobic effect as if we all were journeying in a garbage submarine. (A similar effect is in Das Boot.) Yet, figurative light shines through Poldek's anti-Semitic eyes as the once amoral profiteer becomes a reluctant but generous benefactor to the almost totally helpless Jews. His unheroic visage and his base life of tending to the sewers while profiteering from the lost add to his remarkably Christian acts under the guise of business. The Jews are transformed as well by shedding their prejudices about Poldek.
When the allies liberate those homeless ones, the figurative light returns in all its glory. Although this Holocaust story repeats some common tropes about the genre, this film goes further to explore the deadening world the Jews had to inhabit in order to survive. The film's episodic rather than thematic approach, its narrative reliant on discreet occurrences rather than seamless story, makes its over two hours overly long.
In Darkness is a powerful statement on man's inhumanity to man and the filmmaker's genius recreating one of the the most difficult stories to tell anymore.