The film tells the story of Leopold Socha, who helped Jews during the Nazi occupation of Lvov, a city in Poland. Socha is a sewer worker and one day he encounters a group of Jews trying to escape through the underground. He decides to hide them in exchange for money. It's a powerful story and center of attraction goes to Robert Wieckiewicz's character Socha. It's always hard to execute Holocaust movies and this film offers a new equation to the Holocaust films. It was Poland's entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign language film, but lost to 'A Separation'. Overall, it's a powerful film with most of the sequences shot in dark atmosphere and At the same time it's horrifying and intense too.

This is a realistic and well made true story of a Polish sewage worker saving Jewish people from the purge of the ghetto in Lvov or Lviv city during WWII. The production and cinematography are good. It doesn't have a cheap feel that some Eastern European productions had in the past.It's a true story so there is no point criticizing the events that took place. It's about saving a smaller group of people than Schindler's List. It's not fair to compare it to the larger scale Holocaust epics. It was more on the scale of "The Pianist".The screenplay is realistic showing both sides of the story. The difficulties and demands on the Polish saviour are quite illuminating.The nudity and love making are a bit excessive but I guess they wanted to show everything.Worth a watch.

Director Holland follows a cliché that has become very shopworn; cinema schools should do what that can to outlaw it. As antidote, instructors should repeat as often as needed: "Don't film in the dark." I know the temptation. The director or screenwriter will say, "Let's make the film very mysterious. We will film in such a way the audience will hardly know who is talking or where they are. The intense confusion of the audience will lead the audience inexorably into the terrible frustration and confusion of the film's characters." Sounds plausible. And when Shakespeare produces the ghost of Hamlet's father in the darkness of night, the staging is effective. That however is because the darkness is a brief interruption in the light; there's dramatic contrast. When darkness becomes a dominant cliché, the contrast is lost, and the effect is boring. The audience tends to wonder when the director is going to get back to work. Also, what Aristotle regards as the indispensable identity of the audience with the characters becomes very difficult to generate. IN DARKNESS is a poorly made film about an important subject.

Agnieszka Holland directs "In Darkness". The plot? Deep within the rat invested sewers of Poland, Jewish adults and children spend 14 months hiding. They are aided by Leopold Socha, a Catholic sewer worker. He's your classic "Oskar Schindler" character, initially motivated by greed but begrudgingly morphing into a saviour who risks life, lungs and limbs so that others may one day live free. By the film's end, Socha's Jews are able to exit the sewers, the darkness of the German occupation over and so the darkness of life below ground.Like "The Grey Zone", Holland's "In Darkness" is yet another Holocaust movie which draws clunky, symbolic linkages between literal shadows and the dark immoralities of the Holocaust. And like most Holocaust movies, "Darkness'" tone alternates from moments of simple sentimentality to even simpler brutality. There is no insight here, only a kind of middlebrow art which reduces suffering and history to easy movements.The film was based on Krystyna Ghiger's memoir, "The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow". Agnieszka herself had one Catholic and one Jewish parent, the film's ethical/religious split perhaps echoing her own childhood.At its best, "In Darkness" draws parallels between the sewers and life above ground (no space is sacred, someone is always eavesdropping and everyone is always at risk of being interrupted, discovered or walked in on). Elsewhere Holland does well to show how the filthy sewers gradually become prisons and then tombs. For the most part, though, the film is very weak. Its script is obvious, its poorly shot, Agnieszka can't convey any sense of claustrophobia, of time's passage, or even the squalid conditions of life below ground. Compare with Andrzej Wajda's "Kanal", which likewise attempted to portray life within Poland's underground networks.4/10 - Worth one viewing. See Gavras' "Amen", Holland's own "Europa Europa" and Vittorio de Sica's "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis".