The Dark House

Poland, an autumn night in 1978. Edward Srodon, an animal husbandry specialist travelling for work, takes shelter at a farmhouse by the road when the snow comes down. Dziabas and his wife let him in. The vodka is opened, the table is laid and the night goes on. By morning nobody is the same. Four years later, under martial law, the police stage a reconstruction of that night. Srodon is there and is taken back to the place. What the officers running it want is not the truth; each of them needs a result of his own. Wojciech Smarzowski directs; he wrote the script with Lukasz Kosmicki. Arkadiusz Jakubik, Marian Dziedziel, Bartlomiej Topa and Kinga Preis are in the cast. It is a Polish production. The starting point of the screenplay was a real case read in a crime magazine. The film won best director, best screenplay and best editing at the 2009 Gdynia Polish Film Festival. The narrative keeps cutting the two times together; that night and the reconstruction four years later run into each other. The matter it treats is the investigation itself; nobody in it wants to find the truth. The film aims directly at the years of martial law and its institutions. Drink is the engine of the story; everything turns around a table with a bottle on it. The images are muddy, dark and cramped; the narrative breathes nowhere. The ending gives justice to nobody. Its limit is harshness; the violence is explicit, the tone bleak, and there is no hope. Who it is for: viewers who like Polish cinema and dark crime narratives. Who it is not for: it is harsh, bleak, and the ending bitter.