Mark Reviews Movies: DARK CRIMES

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 17, 2018

Dark Crimes is a police procedural, which is mostly indifferent to procedure, and a mystery, in which the greatest mystery is how a story so simple and straightforward could be transformed into an almost incomprehensible collection of images and dialogue. That a plot eventually emerges is almost a disappointment. At least the movie gets the brain working when it's only vaguely explains its story, its characters, and its purpose.

Yes, we're trying to figure out basic things, like who these characters are, what they're doing, how any of this could be considered interesting, and why we're watching something so lifeless. Considering that the actual plot could be wrapped up in about five minutes if any of these characters had anything approaching a brain themselves, the initial mystery of the movie's existence seems far more appealing.

The setup is, admittedly, a clever one, so naturally, it has little to do with the people who made the movie. Jeremy Brock's screenplay is based on an article by David Grann, although this is one of those instances in which you wished the movie possessed one of those titles informing us that it's only "inspired by a true story." The actual, strange case of murder and fiction-that-seems-a-bit-too-real that inspired the movie is far more intriguing. In a way, that should be expected. In another way, how could Brock and director Alexandros Avranas find such an assortment of ways to make such an intriguing, real-life story so dull?

The movie's plot follows a Polish detective in Krakow named Tadek (Jim Carrey, doing what sounds more like a mid-Atlantic Irish lilt than a Polish dialect). When I say the movie follows him, I mean that it follows him doing things that barely help us to understand that he's a member of the police force.

We see him tailing some guy coming out of an underground sex club. We see him at breakfast with his disinterested wife Marta (Agata Kulesza) and a daughter who basically disappears from the movie's thoughts. We see Tadek with his elderly mother (played by Anna Polony), who lives alone and doesn't want to die alone—a statement that one could call some heavy-handed foreshadowing, if not for the fact that the mother's next appearance is mostly a surprise reminder of her very existence.

Over the course of the detective's moseying about, we learn that Tadek is a disgraced cop for reasons that are about as unclear as everything else here. The guy either did something or got in the crosshairs of a corrupt cop whose corruption helped him rise in the ranks, or maybe it's both. Does it matter? Not to the filmmakers, it doesn't.

After a seemingly endless series of seemingly unconnected scenes of seemingly pointless busywork, we get the gist of the plot. There was an unsolved murder some time ago. Tadek was in charge of the investigation, and in order to regain his reputation and his position before retiring in about a year, he plans to solve the crime. His prime suspect is an author named Kozlow (Marton Csokas), whose most recent novel involves the main character murdering a man in the exact way that the victim of the unsolved crime was murdered.

That premise is kind of neat, right? Well, the investigation mostly unfolds in the same way as the introduction to these characters and this shady world of murder, corruption, and an illegal sex club. That's to say that it doesn't so much unfold as Avranas just puts some scenes in front of us, hoping that some kind of plot, some kind of mystery, or some kind of anything, really, will form.

Tadek and Marta's relationship apathetically collapses. Tadek begins tracking and becomes involved with the writer's girlfriend Kasia (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who may know the truth and might be able to help Tadek get back at the corrupt cop, or maybe she just exists as the sort of hollow, unthinking pawn that seems to be the state of existence for all of these characters. The battle of wits between Tadek and Kozlow amount to the detective repeatedly insisting on the other's guilt and the author playfully hinting that, while that might be true, it can't be proven.

At this point, it's kind of pointless to say that the solution makes little sense, because there's no other way it could turn out. What we do know by the end of Dark Crimes is that Tadek probably shouldn't be a detective (considering how many vital clues and pieces of information he misses), Avranas cares far more about the atmosphere of a mystery than the vital particulars, and the movie will be memorable as the main character's daughter and mother.

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