Leave No Traces

Mr Matuszynski directs this emotionally hard & challenging recreation of a crime committed by state policemen that turns political as it gets into the spotlight. In a way, this film reminded me of The Trial Of Chicago 7 from 2020. While the dialogue isn't as entertaining & engaging as Mr Sorkin's masterpiece, it does come pretty close in terms of engagement to paint a harsh & compelling picture for its viewers. Well shot & beautifully performed by a cast of young & old (Special mention for Ms Korzeniak & Mr Zietek), you don't want to miss this one. On a side note, I can't believe this is the first user review & the Oscars didn't even bother to include it in their shortlist for international pictures. This grim gem deserves more.

Interesting story, based on real events, but were very badly paced and really drawn out the first half of the movie. Acting was bad, even the background actors like pedestrians were bad. There was some depth and more compelling elements towards the second half of the movie. But many things were "spoiled" ahead of time, and very little was left unknown. It does give more context and background to real life events, but from the perspective of entertainment, it was not... This movie really is mediocre. But the unnecessarily long runtime, the acting and the pacing seriously brought this movie down - despite the somewhat believable city of 1980's Warsaw.

Who contributed to the death of Grzegorz's high school graduate: the policemen against whom the only witness of the beating at the police station testifies, colleague Jurek Popiel or the ambulance crew transporting the wounded and suffering boy to a hospital in communist Poland, right after the abolition of the martial law in 1983? The government on an unprecedented scale unleashes the action of refuting the accusations that its services were involved in the death of a young man, discredits Jurek, manipulates the police investigation, controls the actions of the prosecutor's office and does everything to blame emergency service paramedics. The course of this process of deception, deception, harassment, fabricating false evidence, influencing by any means to change the testimonies of witnesses (shaping the environment, intimidation) is a fascinating lesson in the recent history - totalitarian power in the countries of real communism and is the central part of the picture that occupies the most. The remaining parts raise doubts about the overly extensive multithreading of the plot, and on the other hand, the school, even junior high school logic in the conduct of the action, especially the investigation by the policemen to conclusions as simple as a flail pattern. Exaggerated meticulousness in conducting many narratives does not inspire a positive image, which means that the film lasts almost three hours and the selection of the cast quite wrongly (Sandra Korzeniak as Barbara Sadowska, overhauled and without a shadow of emotion, Aleksandra Konieczna - extraordinarily charging as prosecutor Wieslawa Bardon, Tomasz Dedek - general Wojciech Jaruzelski, Robert Wieckiewicz as general Kiszczak, both playing caricatured characters like puppets or from a wax figures cabinet, Sebastian Pawlak as a medic Wysocki - his psychological reactions are unbelievable, although the leading roles of Tomasz Zietek (as Jurek Popiel) and Jacek Braciak - Tadeusz, Jurek's father, plus at least correct and fit as usual: Tomasz Kot and Agnieszka Grochowska. The lack of twists, suspensions, and other basic instruments in constructing contemporary entertainment cinema is striking. For the sake of balance, the scenography (Pawel Jarzebski - stage designer and Malgorzata Zacharska responsible for the costumes) deserves exceptional approval for detail fidelity, which is meticulous and carefully recreating the realities of the Polish People's Republic of the first half of the 1980s.

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