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.

I've watched many modern day films set in the Second World War, but this was one of the best. After you've viewed the movie, it's impossible to say you've enjoyed it, more that it has impacted on you and reached out to your emotions.The story is of an initially cynical, extorting, Polish petty criminal's gradual bonding with a group of persecuted Jews in the Polish Ghetto who he helps escape from the occupying and terrorising Nazis in the filthy underground sewers where he works in the day-time. He goes from seeing them as an easy mark for money and jewellery, caring not a whit for any one of them, to putting his own life at risk and even killing for them as the story progresses.One of the things that most impressed me was the treatment of all the characters as disparate individuals, each with different motivations and passions. They're none of them saints as they display in no particular order sins of greed, lust, deceit, selfishness and mistrust. The acting was excellent all round, especially from the actor who played central character Socha, who rediscovers his humanity as he gets drawn into a situation he hadn't anticipated and which he initially saw as a potentially profitable strictly business enterprise. It all ends with a last-gasp, nick-of-time reacquaintance between him and them only for the epilogue to sadly tell he didn't survive the war himself.There are many grisly and horrific scenes in the film, from the first one right at the start as a group of naked women are pursued and murdered by jeering Germans, to the reprisal- hanging of a group of ordinary citizens displayed in public, while the depiction of life underground in the filthy sewers on the barest of rations almost beggars belief.My only complaints would be that the final rescue of the group from drowning like rats seemed melodramatic and over-exaggerated for cinematic effect. I also think the passage of time could have been handled better too especially when we are told in the epilogue that the Jews had stayed underground longer than fourteen months.These are minor caveats however. There must be hundreds of these true-life stories of tragedy and heroism arising from the holocaust and every one will deserve to be told, if for no other reason than to refute the holocaust-deniers out there. This particular one was exceptionally well told, eschewing sentimentality for realism and made for compulsive and rewarding viewing.

'In Darkness' proved to be a worthy Polish contender against the foreign film winner 'A Separation'. This film to me is a more successful version of 'Schindler's List' - similar in terms of the portrayal of an unlikely hero who had no reason to save the Jews but did it in the end.(Why so? Schindler's List covered a much wider span, all above ground, with a longer time frame as well, and yet failed miserably as it chose to tone down A LOT of what could have happened in reality given the weight of the situation. I expected more from it as it is not even realistically outstanding to some of the other commendable Holocaust-related work of art.) This film focuses not on the atrocities in the surface, but more on the intricate details in its core matter - things happening underground. Roughly half of the film happens inside the sewers, but with enough details that reminded me of "Hunger" even though the dire situation were not full-fledged in my opinion.We not only get to know of the conflicts between the hero, his non-Jew community against the Jews, but also the conflicting portrayal of the Jews themselves who are not all one-dimensional characters unlike in some other movies (i.e. not overly depressed or in a state of hopelessness, they actually hate each other, some of them are annoying/ traitors/ greedy etc).I too believe things are pretty toned down as well in this film, as living under the sewers in such a situation where the water rendered unusable, the stench unbearable (augmented by the stench of corpses), absence of light, hygiene and proneness to diseases/fatal accidents could easily cause multiple levels of discord and unwanted psychological behaviors.I have read that the director deviated from the real account a little as some of the characters 'killed' are actually survivors today. But in a way, maybe it is for the better as the film is already disturbing enough.Also, some of the scenes done above ground are a little bit unnatural...hence I could not grant a rating above 7 stars. But all in all, this is a well made Holocaust-related film but it is also a film about humanity that is much better than average.

So many Holocaust movies: "Schindler's List," "The Reader," "Shoah," "Europa Europa." I knew "In Darkness" would be frightening, depressing, and disturbing. So, I didn't want to watch "In Darkness." Big mistake. "In Darkness" is a masterpiece. It's better than "Schindler's List." Yes, it is disturbing to watch, but it is great art, and great art, even as it moves us to tears, rewards us. You already know about the horrors of the Holocaust. The gift of "In Darkness" is that it transports the viewer to a better realm, where the best of humanity shines in the worst darkness we humans have produced. That best of humanity is not just Socha, the rescuer, but the filmmakers who, through their art, tell the world Socha's story. "In Darkness" has a verisimilitude, indeed a "darkness," that other Holocaust films do not. No one in this movie would look appropriate placed on a pedestal. Everyone here – Jews and rescuers – is a deeply flawed human being. The Jews hiding in the sewers look and act the way people hiding in sewers would look – filthy, hungry, and bedraggled; they are sometimes petty, jealous, and vengeful. The film is dark and claustrophobic. The Nazis are not sexy and thrilling. They are murderous scum. Not only do characters speak Polish, Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, and Russian, where appropriate, they also spoke Balak, a dialect typical of Poles living in Lwow. Krystyna Chiger, who survived the sewer, said she found the film so real it was hard to watch. None of the actors are well known outside of Poland or Germany, so I was able to invest in them as the characters they were playing in a way that I could never invest in "Schindler's List," which, of course, featured big stars I'd seen in other films – Ralph Fiennes, the handsome lover from "The English Patient," was suddenly giving an Oscar-bait performance as a fat Nazi; Ben Kingsley was no longer Gandhi, but a Jew in a concentration camp. Robert Wieckiewicz as Leopold Socha gives one of the very best, most absorbing, most believable film performances I have ever seen. Wieckiewicz is utterly believable as a petty thief who makes one right choice that leads him onto a path that awakens his soul. He starts out as a rough guy, an opportunist, who isn't ready to be as cruel as life invites him to be. The Nazis are paying bonuses to anyone who turns in Jews. Socha, already a petty criminal, who had initially helped Jews for money, could have made the choice to hand Jews over to the Nazis, for even more money. He didn't. He decided to do the next kind thing. And the next. And the next. And he becomes of the most moving, heroic people you will ever see on screen. If Socha's entirely believable transformation doesn't make you cry … you are tougher than I am. Benno Furmann is especially memorable as Mundek Margulies, one of the Jews who escapes to the sewers. Furmann has pale blue eyes that shine out intensely in the dark sewer scenes, communicating outrage, sorrow, panic, and caged macho. The tense dynamic between him and Socha electrifies their scenes. Theirs is a male-male relationship utterly beyond what any current Hollywood "buddy" movie could hope to portray. Kinga Preis is quietly moving as Wanda Socha, Leopold's plump and freckled, earth-goddess wife. Maria Schrader as one of the Jewish women in hiding adds poignancy without doing anything showy. Michal Zurawski as Bortnik, a Ukrainian who does the dirty work for the Nazis, is very handsome sickening, and terrifying. You can see that Socha could have turned out like his old friend Bortnik. But, somehow, he didn't. Why? Because Bortnik was Ukrainian, not Polish – and thus treated differently by the Nazis? Because Bortnik was more handsome? We don't know. We just get the sense that before he made the one choice that set him on a path that would turn him into a beast, Bortnik was probably much like his old pal, Socha. "In Darkness" is a feature film, not history lesson or a documentary, but for this viewer it dramatized aspects of the Holocaust, and of humanity, that other Holocaust films have failed to adequately address, or to address at all.I've never seen a film that brought home to me so vividly the mass killings of Poles that Nazis carried out. Of course I know about these killings, but, as Joseph Stalin allegedly said, "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." "In Darkness" depicts a mass hanging of randomly selected Polish civilians, killed in retaliation for the death of a German. This scene was orchestrated in such a way that it grabbed me as dry statistics on the page never have. "In Darkness" defies revisionist histories of World War Two that insist that Poles did nothing to help Jews and that Poles were enjoying the high life during the Nazi occupation. "In Darkness" makes clear – Nazis treated Poles with special brutality. Dramatic tension is never lost, even as the viewer learns something he would never learn from something like "Schindler's List." "In Darkness" focuses on a Pole who rescued Jews. This defies popular uses of the Brute Polak stereotype to rewrite World War Two history. Never for one minute, though, does "In Darkness" stop being a big, involving, tense, movie-movie. You care about the characters. You are swept along by the action. You hold your breath during scenes of suspense. You root for success. You tear up when things go wrong. After all that has gone before, the final scene, as humble as it is, is overwhelming. This is just a great film. See it.