Colors of Evil: Black isn’t a whodunit. From an early stage, it’s pretty obvious who’s at fault, and the answer is pretty much everyone. The ending of Adrian Panek’s thriller, a sequel to Colors of Evil: Red, which is also streaming on Netflix, is about uncovering generational rot that has been brushed aside and ignored by the locals of a provincial town in Poland’s insular Kashubia region. And catching a killer, a kidnapper, or someone even more heinous, doesn’t bring about a resolution to that kind of deep-seated dysfunction.
This is something that Leopold Bilski discovers through the movie. As he investigates the kidnapping of Piotrus Sarman, he uncovers connections to another long-ago disappearance and begins chipping away at the conspiracy that links the two crimes. By the climax, he has discovered that almost everyone was involved in one way or another, and that the local community looked away rather than speaking up.
Of Course It Was the Church
Throughout his investigation, Bilski turns up numerous connections to the local church, implying that children in the church choir were abused back in the day at a terrifying scale, including Julia Sarman and others. Because of the close-knit, pious nature of the community, many of the parents of these children chose to ignore the obvious abuse rather than challenge the status quo, leading the children to feel gaslit and betrayed by their own families, on top of everything else.
Chojnacki, the owner of the local meat plant and a part of the church’s inner circle, was behind the molestation. However, neither he nor his son, Marek, is responsible for the abduction of Piotrus, since Chojnacki is long dead. However, his legacy is very much being continued by his closest confidantes, as we’ll see.
Who Kidnapped Piotrus?
The real kidnapper is revealed to be Chojnacki’s illegitimate and mentally damaged son, Nicki, whom he conceived with a 14-year-old choir girl. Chojnacki supported – presumably financially – but never claimed Nicki, who was traumatized by the suicide of his mother, who ended her life in front of him when he was a child.
Nicki’s psychosis manifested slowly, which is why he didn’t kill Piotrus outright and instead kept him alive for long enough that he was eventually able to be saved and returned to his mother. He also didn’t kill Adam, the boy who went missing two years prior, since his death was an accident, but he was tasked with disposing of the body, which included sawing off his head, the sequence that the movie opened with.
The Rot Runs Deep
Naturally, Nicki had help. Chief Adamczyk leaned on Adam’s vulnerable mother, convincing her that Adam had been relocated with a relative, and Bilski’s boss, Andrzej Pakosz, covered up the case further. Pakosz’s own son had been molested by Chojnacki, which he knew about, but nonetheless decided to cover up all the same.
Bilski is astonished to learn the extent of the corruption, though he refuses to stay silent. At the end of Colors of Evil: Black, he confronts Pakosz, accusing him directly of being involved in the conspiracy. We don’t get a great deal of closure about what happens to him, or indeed Nicki, who was his own kind of victim, but the charitable assumption is that these realities being dragged into the harsh light of day will go some way towards helping the town to heal from its generational traumas.
We Haven’t Seen the Last of Leopold Bilski
While the movie doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, per se, it leaves Bilski thoroughly apart from his latest posting, and the implication is that he’ll be moving on to get embroiled in another case sooner rather than later. Since there’s a third book in the trilogy on which these movies are based, that stands to reason.
Bilski’s investigations aren’t confined to killers and their victims; they’re about institutional corruption and deep social rot, and they can’t be “solved” in the traditional sense by merely apprehending the perpetrators. Whatever he gets up to next, it’s sure to be equally complex and challenging. But if this sequel is anywhere close to the sleeper hit its predecessor was, I’m sure it’ll be gracing the Netflix thumbnails sooner rather than later.
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