Justice is a detective thriller set in Poland in the 90s. Photo / Netflix
Justice is a detective thriller set in Poland in the 90s. Photo / Netflix
Justice (MA, 113 mins). Streaming on Netflix; in Polish with English subtitles.
Directed by Michal Gazda.
Reviewed by Jen Shieff.
Justice is a detective thriller set in Poland in the 90s, a time when privatisation was happening at pace and people who used to have an allegiance to communism were changing their political stripes fast.
The story is propelled by the vengeance sought by Kacper (Jedrzej Hycnar), whose mother has committed suicide, ashamed for not being able to repay her bank loan. He’s introduced as a security guard, with a strong attachment to his now-orphaned little sister.
Having been forced to retire from the police force after doing something disgraceful, with no backstory provided except to suggest it was connected to the discredited communist regime, Gadacz (Olaf Lubaszenko) is hauled back into the office to investigate a triple homicide which has taken place inside Kacper’s mother’s bank.
Gadacz needs a shave and looks like a disillusioned social misfit but has a dry wit, a quick brain and a strong sense of what’s right. He’s an interesting character who draws us in and keeps us there.
In his retirement, Gadacz sells garden gnomes in the bleak snowy countryside. We meet him sticking up for one of his employees, who’s being mistreated by a rude customer.
Gadacz tells the customer his gnomes only go to a good home and shoves a refund at him. Clever scripting by Bartosz Staszczyszyn, propelling us to the good heart of the central character.
Enter a well-dressed woman, one Prokuratorka (Magdalena Boczarska), powerful, with links to a minister of something unnamed, who assigns Gadacz to a triple murder case, promising him his job and reputation will be restored if he succeeds – quickly, before privatisation of the bank.
On accepting the challenge and offer, Gadacz meets his partner on the case, Janicka (Wiktoria Gorodeckaja), known as “Pocket” in light of her main police work to date: chasing pickpockets.
After a rocky start, the pair team up well, forming an understanding which adds depth to both their characters.
Three women, bank employees, are shown to us in flashbacks being shot dead for having heard the name of one of three masked perpetrators.
Cash has been stolen, but not enough to warrant that amount of blood. What’s happened?
Gadacz smartly identifies Kacper as the leader of the three, and the story becomes a matter of how fast Gadacz and Pocket can find the evidence needed to convict him.
Kacper’s lifeline is an alibi brought about by trading security guard shifts, which is corroborated by his two collaborators, ill-fated Bartek (Lukasz Szczepanowski) and Marek (Stanislaw Linowski), but which doesn’t stand up to Gadacz’s scrutiny.
His personal torment is compounded when he fails to hold what’s left of his family together, taking desperate, ultimately hopeless measures to rescue his sister from an orphanage before another family takes her.
Suitably set in the grey Polish winter, Michal Gazda’s film is gritty and rather grim, but the humanity of the characters stands out and it’s fascinating to see how things don’t work out for them, and where justice is, if there’s any at all.
