Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | June 16, 2026
I love a good, dark mystery — this site is littered with reviews of them — but sometimes, it’s like we used to say in the aughts: Lighten up, Francis.
Such is the case for the Polish-language crime thriller Colors of Evil: Black on Netflix. It’s a sequel to Colors of Evil: Red, which centered on an investigation into femicide. How can things possibly get even more grim? This one is about crimes against children.
It follows our returning protagonist, prosecutor Leopold Bilski (Jakub Gierszał) — in Poland, a prosecutor runs police investigations — now dispatched to the small Kashubian town of Kartuzy, where a child has gone missing. That disappearance turns out to be connected to a series of others. Obviously, we are firmly in the territory of the most heinous kinds of child crimes. No one cracks a smile in Colors of Evil: Black. Ever.
I’ll spoil it for you right now: It’s not really a whodunit. They do find the man responsible for the initial disappearance, moments before the child is strung up in a tree. But that’s almost beside the point. The real question the film is asking is: Who didn’t do it. Because the answer, it turns out, is almost nobody. The disappearances have been going on for years, and virtually everyone in power — the police, the people running the local meatpacking factory, even the parents of some victims — is complicit in the coverup. Silence, it seems, is easily purchased.
Everyone in this town is drowning in something, which makes everyone in this town susceptible to a buyout. Nobody believes that reporting these crimes will change anything, because nobody in this town has given them any reason to believe otherwise. They are corrupt and they are cowards, every last one of them — except for Bilski, who at least has the decency to drag the whole rotten thing into the light.
It is not an enjoyable film. It offers no escapism, no catharsis, no exhale of relief at the end. Just grimness stacked on top of brutal grimness. It’s adequately well-made, but the World Cup is on. Widow’s Bay is on. Watch almost anything else. There has got to be a better way to spend 110 minutes.
