CHICAGO – Excelsior! Comic book legend Stan Lee’s famous exclamation puts a fine point on the third and final play of Mark Pracht’s FOUR COLOR TRILOGY, “The House of Ideas,” presented by and staged at City Lit Theater in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. For tickets/details, click HOUSE OF IDEAS.
Film Review: ‘In Darkness’ Illuminates Another Horror of the Holocaust
CHICAGO – The subject of the Holocaust has become an entire film genre onto it’s own, embracing many different styles. The latest Holocaust film, “In Darkness,” feels like a disaster movie, and iconic Polish director Agnieszka Holland has steered it to a Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
Rating: 3.5/5.0 |
Based on a true story, it begins with the self-serving nature of human beings and evolves into their better angels. In the harboring of Polish Jews within a wretched sewer system, it also becomes emblematic of the whole evil of the Holocaust, the banishment of living human beings into the darkness of a hole in the earth, constituting a form of hell. Although many tales of these events have made into narrative films, to think about the reality of what actually happened is almost too much to fathom. This realization of hell is another bitter reminder of what humanity has had to consume.
Leopold Socha (Robert Wiecklewicz) is a sewer worker and petty thief in 1943. He is trying to survive with his wife in Lvov, Poland, during the teeth of World War II. He has a friend named Bortnik (Michel Zuraski), who is a high ranking Nazi Ukrainian officer. Bortnik offers favors to Socha if he will find Jews hiding in the sewers of Lvov and turn them in. Emboldened by the idea, Socha actually comes across a group of Jews within the dank confines of the world below. But the tables are turned, and the group offers Socha money to harbor them.
Seizing opportunity, Socha agrees to the arrangement. What begins as a mercenary mission, becomes something deeper as he observes the courage of sheer survival. As the boot of suspicion pushes down, Socha first considers abandoning his charges, but then gets even more involved when he helps one of the group, Margulies (Benno Fürmann), with a rescue attempt in a concentration camp. When the money runs out from the starving sewer dwellers and floods threaten them, Socha will understand the true light and meaning of what he is protecting.
Photo credit: Sony Pictures Classics |