Rating: 0/10 | Genre: Crime, Thriller, Mystery
Starring: Jakub Gierszał, Marianna Zydek, Zdzisław Wardejn, Andrzej Chyra, Robert Gonera
So I finally watched Colors of Evil: Black and I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. It’s a Polish crime thriller about a prosecutor named Leopold Bilski investigating missing children in some small town, and there’s this creepy local legend mixed into everything. On paper that sounds pretty solid. In execution, it’s messier than you’d hope.
Jakub Gierszał plays Bilski and he brings a decent amount of intensity to the role. The guy actually feels worn down by what he’s investigating, which matters when you’re dealing with a story about vanished kids. The problem is the script doesn’t give him much to work with. His character spends a lot of time staring intensely at things or sitting in rooms looking concerned, but we don’t really get inside his head. We just know something bad is happening and he’s upset about it.
The pacing is what really killed this for me. The first hour moves like it’s wading through mud. There are these long sequences of Bilski talking to locals and investigating crime scenes, but nothing actually happens. You wait and wait for the tension to build and it just kind of sits there. Then in the last stretch the movie suddenly gets frantic, like the filmmakers realized they needed to wrap things up and decided to cram everything in.
The local legend angle is interesting though. There’s this folk horror element that could have been genuinely unsettling if the movie leaned into it more. Instead it feels half-baked. We get hints and whispers about what this legend is, but the movie never fully commits to making it scary. It’s like the director couldn’t decide if he wanted to make a straightforward police procedural or something more supernatural, so he tried to do both and ended up doing neither well.
Andrzej Chyra shows up at some point and he’s solid as always, but his character felt undercooked too. Everyone in this cast seems competent, but they’re all working with material that doesn’t give them much to sink their teeth into. There are scenes that hint at real drama but they get glossed over way too quickly.
The cinematography is fine. It’s all gray and cold, which makes sense for a grim story set in a remote Polish town. But “fine” is kind of the problem with the whole movie. Nothing is actively bad enough to get mad at. It’s just kind of there, taking up two hours without really justifying the time investment.
I wanted to like this more than I did. The premise had potential and the cast is good. But the execution just isn’t there. It feels like a movie that needed another pass in the editing room and maybe some work on the script to actually flesh out the characters and the central mystery. The ending tries to deliver some kind of payoff but by then I’d already mentally checked out.
Have you seen this one yet, or are you thinking about checking it out? I’d be curious if it lands better for other people or if I’m not alone in feeling like it missed its mark.
Where to Watch
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