In Darkness by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Actors

• Robert Wieckiewicz
• Benno Fürmann
• Agnieszka Grochowska
• Maria Schrader
• Herbert Knaup

Format

• AC-3
• Color
• Dolby
• Subtitled
• Widescreen

Editorial Review

In Emir Kusturica's allegorical Underground, an entire community waited out World War II below the streets of Yugoslavia. By contrast, Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa) draws from actual events for her third Oscar-nominated adaptation. Unlike the respectable businessman at the heart of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz in a terrific performance) is a sewer worker and petty thief living in Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), during the height of the Holocaust. When the Catholic encounters a band of Jewish citizens attempting to avoid deportation to the Janowska camp by hiding out in the city's sewer system, he senses an opportunity to better provide for his wife (Kinga Preis, Four Nights with Anna) and daughter. Socha and his partner, Szczepek (Krzysztof Skonieczny), are hardly altruistic–Nazis will pay $500 for each Jew they turn in–but they know the nooks and crannies of the terrain. For an even steeper price, they provide food and other resources to a group that includes con man Mundek (North Face's Benno Fürmann), de facto leader of a multilingual group that includes women, children, and an especially vulnerable baby. The next 14 months will test them all. In drawing from Robert Marshall's In the Sewers of Lvov, Holland has made one of her finest films. Though it shares themes and visual parallels with The Pianist and even The Descent–most of the movie takes place in cramped spaces–Socha's segue from sewer rat to humanitarian registers as a surprisingly convincing, profoundly inspiring evolution. –Kathleen C. Fennessy