The based-on-a-true-story, Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film, In Darkness, positions us just there: in the sewers with raw humanity and inhumanity unrelentingly clashing in each scene. On the streets above, the darkness is metaphorical but palpable. Lives are exchanged like currency and sympathy is non-existent. Directed by Agnieszka Holland, this film is set is Lvov, Poland and centers on Leopold Socha, (Robert Wieckiewicz), a sewer worker, petty thief, and advantageous entrepreneur.
The premise of In Darkness is that, for a price, Socha will risk his own life by hiding a dozen Jewish refugees in the sewers that run under the Nazi-occupied city. Throughout, we are shown brutalities in the perpetual conflict of man against man. Often, these actions are juxtaposed with those of the rats inhabiting the sewer. For each bit of violence between men, a pack of rats is shown to fight over a piece of food, each one climbing on the other’s back for an advantage. Their carnivorous, survival-first attitude bleeds over into those of the refugees’, making In Darkness a film that explores the extent to which people will go to survive.
However, this is both the beauty of the film and the problem inherent in the genre into which it has entered. It is difficult to call this a bad film. The acting is stellar and the camera is unflinching, only leaving us without exposition when a group of naked women runs through the forest, seemingly herded by gun-toting Nazi soldiers. As shots wring out, Holland gives us respite from the horrific riddling of flesh, preferring to show us a landscape or a labrynthine section of trees. He only reminds us of the outcome after the shots cease and the milky white bodies lay in an uncannily eerie kaleidoscopic pattern of death and tyranny. Much like the moment in Schindler’s List when Oskar realizes that human ash, and not snow, is falling on his overcoat, we are overcome with the historical presence of brutality.
At the same time, In Darkness often relies on our knowledge of this historical atrocity to keep us riveted to the screen. The Holocaust deserves to be remembered and revisited in hopes of guiding future generation away from such evil; however, the film itself sheds no new light on the subject. Instead, it covers the basic tropes present in most Holocaust films: man’s inhumanity to man, the barbarous fight for survival, nebulous demarcations of difference (Christian / Jew, Man / Woman, Good / Evil, Germans and Everyone else), and the presence of capitalism in evil deeds. (As Keynes noted, “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greater good of everyone.”) And, like Oskar Schindler, Leopold embodies the man who transitions from an opportunist into a sympathizer. And, for the real-life Socha, we should be grateful, but the cinematic version teaches us nothing new. Rather, the result is a less a novel commentary on the events or people of the Holocaust, and more of a summary of those themes and lessons that have been demonstrated just as well in previous films.
One interesting aspect of In Darkness is the frequency with which sex is shown. Often in Holocaust cinema, we see the naked bodies of those in camps, and their emaciation creates and unsettling feeling of sameness and difference within the viewer. By design, this connects us to the victims and forces us to imagine ourselves in their place. We also often see beautiful German woman on the arms of Nazi officers or sympathizers, thus suggesting the evils of superficiality and the egoistic conquests that result. However, it’s not often that we see sex accompanying nudity within the Jewish contingent in these films. In one sense, perhaps the inclusion of sex is similarly meant to connect their human desires to the Germans and to our own. It also might be to establish a contrast between the stereotypical German-perversion of sex – something that is also demonstrated by the Nazi soldiers chasing the milky, naked women to their deaths like feral animals closing in on a kill.
Or, maybe showing Jews on the precipice of extermination having sex is a way to further parallel the human natures of Poles, Germans, and Jews. Ironically, the agenda of the Third Reich – the perpetuation of a race – is similar to the Jewish agenda: the perpetuation of a race. Clearly, the methods of the former are much more sadistic, but the presence of intercourse suggests – from a biological standpoint – a similar pragmatic desire, though one is clearly more nefarious than the other.
In Darkness emphasizes all that is common to Holocaust cinema. It makes us questions our faith in humanity and offers a silver lining that often weaves in and out of the evil that we perpetuate. It also reminds us of a humbling history that marked its time less than a century ago.