This article contains major spoilers for the In for a Murder ending.
Piotr Mularuk’s odd, could-be-better murder-mystery In for a Murder is a funny old thing, sometimes intentionally and sometimes quite by accident. It’s part buddy adventure – the protagonist, Magda, teams up with the town’s useless detective Jacek to solve a murder – part comedy, part drama, and part Knives Out tribute act. It’s almost always weird, though, and since it’s a mystery, there’s one big reason for even an unconvinced viewer to keep watching – to find out whodunit.
The almost always brightly lit township of Podkowa Lesna is a decent setting for both the mystery and a thinly-veiled – albeit toothless – satirization of suburbia, but it’s Magda who holds the whole thing together, portraying a likable housewife with intuitive deductive reasoning who is put-upon by the needs of her two children and her truly awful husband Tomasz. After discovering a corpse of a woman named Joanna Maj while out walking her dog, Magda teams up with Jacek (who happens to be the brother of her eccentric friend Elka and one of Magda’s old buddies) to get to the bottom of matters.
Almost immediately, the presence of a necklace on the dead woman with the telltale letter “W” leads Magda to suspect that the disappearance of her long-time missing best friend Weronika might be connected to the murder. And thus begins a descent down a rabbit hole of possible suspects fraught with red herrings and the odd meaningful clue. A selfie including the dead woman leads Magda from Suzie, her husband’s airhead squeeze, to senatorial candidate Bruno Szeliga, with whom Magda suspects Joanna might have been having an affair. Bruno’s wife, though, claims she attended the party with a printing clerk named Cieslak.
In for a Murder ending explained
At Joanna’s funeral, Magda is told by Weronika’s mother that she and Joanna worked together, hence the passing back-and-forth of such a one-of-a-kind necklace, and also that Weronika was forced to leave home due to an illegitimate pregnancy whom Weronika’s former boss – Suzie’s husband Czerwinkski – reveals was Bruno Szeliga. This fits him up nicely for the murders, of course, but Magda isn’t convinced. As it turns out, Szeliga’s wife, along with a complicit Czerwinkski, is the guilty party, responsible for the deaths of both Weronica and Joanna.
And in case you didn’t pick up on the whole cage metaphor at the end there, when Magda is overheard eavesdropping and locked away, then at least she manages to escape the trappings of her toxic marriage. That’s a happy ending if ever there was one.
