In Darkness - 3 stars

In Darkness is a Polish movie set in Nazi-occupied Poland. It's about a sewer worker named Leopold Socha. With all the Jewish people kicked out of their homes and living in the ghetto, Leopold and his friend go into the empty homes and steal everything they can get their hands on. One day, Leopold runs across a group of Jews hiding in the sewers. Rather than turn them in, he agrees to hide them in return for payment.

Is it fair to compare every movie about the Holocaust to Schindler's List? Probably not, but it's hard not to. In this case, we have a man who is not Jewish saving a group of Jews. And at one point, he does make a list. He can only hide and feed a limited number, so he asks them to pick 10 people to be saved (they talk him up to 12, since Jesus had 12 apostles).

Socha has a wife and a young daughter. He doesn't tell his wife about the Jews for a long time, and when she does find out, she is less than supportive. Not because she doesn't like them - earlier in the movie she says that Jews are just like them - but because she is afraid of what will happen to her family. Socha is risking their lives by hiding the Jews.

Like all movies about the Holocaust, there are the requisite number of scenes showing the brutality of the Nazis. At one point, a young Nazi soldier is killed. To retaliate, the Nazis hang 20 random Polocks from the town.

As I said, it may not be fair to compare this to Schindler's List. It's not as good, and the end does not pack the emotional punch that it feels like it should. It also does not really show us much we haven't seen before. But the movie is effective. We feel the claustrophobia they must have felt while being stuck in the sewers. We feel the terror when a Nazi says to Socha "There may be Jews hiding in the sewers. Let's go take a look."

Considering the horror and scale of the Holocaust, there is no end to the number of true stories that can be told about it. This is another one, and it is worth seeing.