Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Colors of Evil: Red’ on Netflix, A Polish Thriller About A Mother’s Search For Answers In Her Daughter’s Murder

Colors of Evil: Red, now streaming on Netflix, is adapted from Kolory Zła: Czerwień, the first novel in a popular three-book series by Polish author Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak. When a young woman is murdered in the coastal Baltic region of Poland, her mother, a prominent judge, teams with a prosecutor new to the area to discover what really happened. Because there are lots of questions that could seemingly be answered by the piles of evidence that nobody else is investigating. Colors of Evil: Red, directed by Adrian Panek and written by Panek and Łukasz M. Maciejewski, stars Maja Ostaszewski (Broad Peak), Jakub Gierszał (The Getaway King), and Zofia Jastrzębska (Infamy).     

COLORS OF EVIL: RED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: When the manager of a Gdynia nightclub called Shipwreck asks why he should hire her as his new bartender, Monika (Jastrzębska) just says it’s because guys will line up to buy drinks – and drugs – from her. “On their knees.” It’s a bolt of confidence, and pretty soon she’s the club’s most popular attraction. But what she considers a lark – dating the manager, and helping him move party drugs on the side – just as quickly turns tragic. And when Monika’s mutilated body turns up on the beach, it’s up to rookie prosecutor Leopold Bilski (Gierszał) to not only break the bad news to her mother, Judge Helena Bogucka (Ostaszewski), but to try and build a case around Monika’s murder. And that’s damn difficult with his supervisor giving him the runaround and the assigned detectives going out of their way to be unhelpful.

Helena blames herself and her failing marriage to high-powered lawyer Roman (Andrzej Zieliński) for what befell Monika. They should have been more present in the life of their daughter. But the circumstances of her death are particularly grisly, and suggest she was the victim of a psychopath or sadistic serial killer. As Bilski works the case from his end, uncovering similarities between Monika’s murder and the deaths of other young women in Poland’s Tricity region, Helena’s frustrations with Roman boil over into suspicion. As it turns out, he’s listed as the legal counsel for Shipwreck, which is owned (through a shell company, of course) by a powerful local gangster named Łukasz (Przemyslaw Bluszcz). Why was her husband working for a mobster? And did Łukasz have something to do with Monika’s murder? 

Colors of Evil: Red builds in the pace of a police procedural as it moves along, and employs a flashback format that’s at its best when it helps us learn a little more about Monika as a person. There’s also a medical examiner (Andrzej Konopka) whose connection to Helena is more than professional, his creepy son who also knew Monika, and the matter of a red ruby ring, Helena’s mother’s, which Monika always wore in life. Now she’s dead, the ring is missing, nobody’s talking, and if Helena and Bilski aren’t careful, they might be next.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 2021 film Operation Hyacinth featured a gritty period setting, solid procedural vibes, and a message in support of the Polish LGBTQ community. And The Plagues of Breslau echoed some of the mystery components and darker elements of the mayhem at work in Colors of Evil: Red.   

Performance Worth Watching: Maja Ostaszewski deserves more screen time in Colors of Evil, but she makes the most of what she has, with a ton of mileage earned from a series of ever more drawn looks. The specifics of Helena’s dissolving marriage to Roman go unspoken, but the mistakes they made are written all over Ostaszewski’s features.    

Memorable Dialogue: It is only in the terrible aftermath of their daughter’s murder that Helena and Roman can finally admit to each other how little they did to help her. “We failed her,” Helena tells him flatly. “We simply failed her.”  

Sex and Skin: Colors of Evil includes disturbing scenes of sexual violence and assault.

Our Take: As awful as Monika’s fate is in Colors of Evil: Red, her cause of death and the condition of her body are the kind of red flags that can signal a satisfying thriller/murder mystery. This film, though, is somewhat less than satisfying. It’s capably directed, and outside of its grim narrative, the shooting locations in Poland are spectacular. But while Helena and Bilski are each driven to solve the crime – justice for Monika, of course, but also because her death could very well be linked to larger patterns of police corruption – the characters are often left to simply react to whatever discoveries they make, and feed that information back into the same foreboding cul-de-sac. We go round and round with their investigation as they uncover bits of evidence and other intriguing morsels, but the fact is that what they uncover felt pretty obvious from the get-go. We want to root for them, and see that true justice gets done. But the payoffs in Colors of Evil: Red are too clear by far, and a couple of late twists make the whole thing feel protracted even further.    

Our Call: Skip It. Colors of Red: Evil is structurally sound as a thriller, and it includes a handful of good performances. But the primary colors of its plot bleed through too early for the suspense to really build.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.