In Darkness
Metascore
74 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 36 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 31 out of 36
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 36
  3. Negative: 1 out of 36
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  1. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Mick LaSalle
    Feb 23, 2012
    100
    In Darkness is an extraordinary movie, and somehow good art creates its own uplift.
  2. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    Feb 17, 2012
    100
    The reason we feel so close to Socha, a man who at first seems nothing more than a racist scoundrel, is that his moral odyssey, with its advances and retreats, is so emotionally believable.
  3. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    Feb 15, 2012
    91
    The fine Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa) pays her respects with a daringly murky-looking movie that demands viewers enter the void too and meet Socha and his Jews as real, flawed men and women behaving in flawed ways under suffocating conditions.
  4. New York Observer
    Reviewed by: Rex Reed
    Dec 8, 2011
    88
    In Darkness is gloomy and hard to take for a running time of 145 minutes, but it's an important film, related with deep conviction, and uncompromising in its understanding of the remarkable things members of the human race have done - to, for, and against each other - in the wilderness of war.
  5. NPR
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    Feb 15, 2012
    85
    The elephant in the room of any discussion of Poland and the Jews is that country's less-than-glorious record of betrayal and collaboration with the Nazis. Holland, who is half-Jewish and whose mother was active in the Polish Resistance, doesn't shrink from that legacy.
  6. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    Mar 8, 2012
    83
    One of the great achievements of In Darkness, is in creating a sense of life in the sewers.
  7. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Tasha Robinson
    Feb 8, 2012
    83
    While In Darkness sticks to formula, it brings across that formula effectively.

User Reviews

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User Score
7.1 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 15 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4 out of 5
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 5
  3. Negative: 0 out of 5
  1. jeremyp
    8
    A taut thriller about a true story of a dozen jews hiding out in a sewage system under Warsaw in 1944-45. Their savior is a Catholic Pole who starts off as your usual anti semitic Polish peasant type yet develops, against his own fear and biases, into a true hero, warts and all. His motivation starts off as greed (they pay him in cash and jewelry) but grows from that to humanitarian concern, in part due to his more liberal wife. The characters are well developed and show an honest diversity of humans all dealing with imprisonment, terror, and starvation. A well crafted movie that tells itself without undue drama or pity. I'm not sure how well it will play out in Poland, a country well known for it's depravity and soullessness to it's own Jewish citizens.… Full Review »
  2. CitizenCharlie
    4
    In Darkness is aptly titled. This film is incredibly dark, both in a lighting sense and its subject matter. Based on the book, In the Sewers of Lvov: a Heroic Story of Survival from the Holocaust, In Darkness joins a long line of films which document Jewish ghettos during World War II. The story follows an individual group of Jews who evade the Nazis once the ghetto massacre begins. The group dug a hole from one of their small apartments which leads down into the murky mess of the Lvov, Poland sewers. The resident lord of the sewers is Lvovâ… Full Review »
  3. TheDRauch
    8
    While certainly not the only film to touch base on the horrors of the holocaust,
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