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In Darkness Movie Review

In Darkness is a 2011 Polish historical drama film directed by Agnieszka Holland and starring Robert Wieckiewicz. It’s a solidly made, but familiar WWII movie.

Leopold Socha is a sewer worker in Nazi-occupied Lvov, Poland. When he finds a group of Jews hiding in the sewers, Leopold agrees to protect them from the Nazis. Though he is solely motivated by cash at first, their experiences lead Leopold to adopt a different view of the people under his protection. When catastrophe strikes, Leopold is forced into a final act of courage. This movie was based on a true story, which lent it some necessary authenticity.

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This films was so well executed across the board. It’s well crafted in terms of cinematography that is striking in imagery and quite claustrophobic in its overall atmosphere. It’s also well score, very well acted by its competent cast and well directed by Holland, a director who is best known for her WWII period pieces.

There is also a lot of cinematic qualities to be found in this story that was ripe for the big screen treatment. The scenes in the sewers were intense and very memorable. They were so strong, in fact, that they rendered the rest of the movie much less exciting and/or involving. The ending itself was too optimistic for what was before that a prevailingly dark picture.

But my main issue with In Darkness is its overall familiarity as we have seen this story before in Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’. Both movies share that Aryan savior narrative and that made this flick instantly forgettable and uninspired. Yes, it happened in real life and it took a while for the protagonist to really become heroic, which was grounded in reality, but still this is not a story that needed to have been told after Spielberg did it years ago.

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The movie was ultimately just another solid flick in a string of okay, but uninspired Academy Award nominees for this year’s foreign film category. It’s a further proof that World War II, though ripe for cinema treatment, is overdone as a subject and it needs to take a break already.