Colors of Evil: Red

The Polish coastline in the summer should be all about overpriced waffles, sun-bleached pier head-walks, and the Baltic Sea looking like a sheet of grey glass. But in Colors of Evil: Red, director Adrian Panek turns the vacation hotspots of the Tricity—Gdańsk, Gdynia, and Sopot—into a neon-drenched purgatory where the sand is perpetually damp and the secrets are even colder. I watched this on a rainy Tuesday while my cat, Barnaby, spent ten minutes trying to "save" the digital seagulls on the Sopot beach from the TV screen, and honestly, the cat’s frantic energy was a decent match for the film’s opening minutes.

We’ve seen the "body on the beach" trope a thousand times, but Red tries to give it a fresh coat of paint—literally. When a young woman is found with her lips surgically removed, it’s not just a murder; it’s a signature. It’s the kind of grim, stylized violence that screams "streaming era procedural," designed to make you click "Next Episode" before you’ve even finished your popcorn. Except this isn't a miniseries; it's a 112-minute dive into the underbelly of Polish nightlife.

Sopot Noir and the Streaming Standard

Released directly onto Netflix, Colors of Evil: Red is a fascinating specimen of the "Global Noir" phenomenon. There’s a specific visual language at play here—high-contrast lighting, drone shots of cargo ships, and a score by Bartosz Chajdecki that pulses with a low-frequency dread. It feels polished, expensive, and ready for an international audience. It’s essentially 'Se7en' if David Fincher had a smaller budget and a weird obsession with Polish coastal real estate.

The film benefits immensely from its lead, Jakub Gierszał, who plays the dogged prosecutor Leopold Bilski. Gierszał (who you might recognize from the frantic Suicide Room) has matured into a leading man who can do "brooding detective" without making it feel like a parody. He’s got that sharp, angular intensity that works perfectly for a man who is clearly skipping meals to look at autopsy photos. He’s paired with Maja Ostaszewska, playing the victim’s mother, a judge who decides that the law is too slow for her grief. Their chemistry isn't romantic—it’s a shared, jagged desperation that anchors the movie when the plot starts to feel a bit too much like a collection of thriller clichés.

The Anatomy of a Polish Thriller

What I appreciated most was the way the screenplay (penned by Łukasz M. Maciejewski and Panek) weaves the past and present. We get glimpses of the victim, Monika, played by Zofia Jastrzębska. Instead of being just a "dead girl" in a drawer, we see her life in the high-end clubs run by the local mob boss, "Kazar" (Przemysław Bluszcz). It gives the violence weight, though I’ll admit the film occasionally veers dangerously close to the "torture porn" territory that peaked in the mid-2000s.

There’s a subtext here about the corruption of the elite—the way the rich and powerful in these coastal towns treat the world like their personal playground. It’s a very "now" theme, reflecting a global exhaustion with the untouchable upper class. However, the film doesn't quite have the runtime to deconstruct this as deeply as a 10-part series might. It’s a brisk, efficient engine that prioritizes the "who" and the "how" over the "why."

Stuff You Might Not Have Noticed

If the title feels a bit specific, that’s because this is an adaptation of the first book in Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak’s "Colors of Evil" trilogy. In the literary world, it’s a massive hit in Poland, and Netflix is clearly betting on "White" and "Black" being greenlit soon. It’s the franchise model in action—why tell one story when you can build a chromatic universe?

Interestingly, the Tricity setting isn't just a backdrop. In real-life Poland, Sopot is the "party capital," a place where the lines between legitimate business and the criminal underworld have historically been... blurry. Locals will tell you that the film’s depiction of the "shipyard shadow" is more accurate than the tourism board would like to admit. The cinematography by Tomasz Augustynek captures this duality perfectly; the beach looks beautiful from a distance but feels suffocatingly cold when the camera gets close to the water.

Ultimately, Colors of Evil: Red is a solid, if somewhat predictable, entry into the contemporary thriller canon. It doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it balances the griminess of its subject matter with some genuinely slick production values. If you’re a fan of The Bridge or The Killing, you’ll feel right at home in these Polish shipyards. It’s a perfect "Friday night with a glass of wine" movie—engaging enough to keep you guessing, but not so revolutionary that you’ll be up all night thinking about it. Just keep an eye on your cat if there are seagulls on screen.