In Darkness: Critic Reviews

A daringly murky-looking movie that demands viewers enter the void...

It is suspenseful, horrifying and at times intensely moving. But the ease with which it elicits these responses from the audience feels more opportunistic than insightful.

There is release at the end of this fine film, but no euphoria; just a sense of having come through a period of evil, the memory of whose darkness will never entirely lift.

The film looks fine, is structured intelligently, measures out the horror in pragmatic amounts. In the end, though, it's that professionalism that gets in the way.

Every Holocaust movie, however hair-raising, essentially thrums the same self-sacrifice-versus-self-preservation chord. It's not fair, but there it is: We've been here before.

Only Wieckiewicz provides some light, in the humanity that gradually shapes Socha's experience. It's a transformation as wrenching to watch as it is vital to remember.

The suspense here, derived from a true story, is excruciating and inspiring in equal measure.

When it's over, you'll be relieved to come up for air. You'll also be glad you took the plunge down under.

The chiseled Furmann gives Mundek a savvy, even moral, brawn. As Paulina, Maria Schrader makes an argument for gentle yet pragmatic maternalism.

In outline, In Darkness is a standard conversion melodrama, but little within those parameters is easy. The darkness lingers into the light.

Honesty is the movie's greatest strength.

Yet another movie in which Jews escape death in the Holocaust through the actions of a gentile with a conscience.

Robert Wieckiewicz is good as the conflicted protagonist, but the most valuable player here is cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska, who turns in handsome work even though most of the action transpires in inky blackness.

Holland, shooting in confined spaces with little light, elicits taut performances from a strong cast.

The film is a morally challenging examination of the vexed Polish Catholic-Jewish relations of the era and a rich portrait of a man moving almost reluctantly toward righteousness.

Based on a true story, "In Darkness" is obviously tough to watch, especially since Holland's camera is both unforgiving and relentlessly human.

Wieckiewicz is outstanding, his open face expressing a full range of emotions, often within the same scene, sometimes within the same conversation. Is he a good man? Or is he a greedy man moved to do good things?

With the exception of the group's leader, movie-star handsome Mundek Margulies (German-born, internationally recognized Benno Furmann), the characters are flat as shadows.

Holland has said that she wanted her harrowing and rewarding epic to run long so it would make viewers feel that they're in the sewers as well. In this, she succeeds.

In Darkness presents a credible scenario about the effects of desperate times upon the human psyche, and it also shows how base human instinct can nevertheless be elevated.

The setting - a rat-infested sewer lit by flashlights and candles - and the memorable central performance from Robert Wieckiewicz etch themselves on the imagination.

Harrowing, engrossing, claustrophobic and sometimes literally hard to watch...

Real life brims with startling atrocities as well as cliches, and this film is full of both.

In a world where everyone was looking for an angle, hoping to survive the nightmare and maybe even turn other people's misery into a tidy profit, the fact that a fragile humanity survived at all is little short of a miracle.

"In Darkness" is a powerful film about those who refuse to yield, either to certain death or to complicity with evil.