In Darkness

A film set in occupied Lviv. Socha is a sewer worker. He knows every tunnel under the city and in his spare time breaks into houses. The ghetto is being emptied. A group of people go down into the sewers and Socha finds them there. He makes a bargain. He will hide them and bring food; in return he will be paid daily. From there the film takes place underground. Narrow tunnels, running water, darkness, the sound of rats, and a group of people. Their number falls over time. Some try to leave, some fall ill, some cannot get along with each other. The group is not uniform. There is a wealthy family among them, a thief, a pregnant woman, and conflict keeps breaking out. Socha's calculation changes. The money runs out but he does not abandon them, and he cannot explain the reason himself. His wife finds out. She knows how dangerous it is and objects. What the narrative is interested in is not heroism but habit: the film does not present Socha as a good man; where his decision comes from is deliberately left unclear. The darkness is a real choice. Much of the film was shot so dark as to be nearly invisible, and the audience cannot quite see what is happening in the tunnel either. The languages are mixed. Polish, Yiddish, German and Ukrainian run inside the same narrative and the subtitling follows that. The source is a real event and the hiding described lasted fourteen months. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for foreign film. Robert Więckiewicz, Benno Fürmann, Agnieszka Grochowska and Maria Schrader are in the cast. Agnieszka Holland directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes hard, distanced films about the Holocaust. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by confined spaces; the narrative runs close to two and a half hours and almost all of it is underground.