Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Justice’ on Netflix, a Sturdy, Slow-burn Polish Police Procedural

Justice continues the trend of Netflix movies with titles so generic, Googling them brings up a basic Webster’s definition (and, in this case, a specific mall-retailer chain). I guess it’s a straightforward title for a relatively straightforward movie, a grim-toned dramatic thriller starring Olaf Lubaszenko as a disgraced detective hauled out of forced retirement to investigate a triple homicide. Director Michal Gazda (Forgotten Love) helms this Polish-language production, which is just knotty enough to keep us moderately enthralled as we watch a scruffy, perhaps morally squishy protagonist do what he does best.

JUSTICE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Garden gnomes. He sells garden gnomes. In the middle of nowhere. It’s the kind of job you take when you have a stink on you from the previous gig – sort of like how Daniel Day-Lewis decided to become a cobbler for a while there in the late ’90s. That’s Gadacz (Lubaszenko). And he’s a principled man. When a customer is rude to Gadacz’s coworker, Gadacz takes back the gnomes, shoves a refund into the jerk’s hands and sends him packing. THESE GNOMES ONLY GO TO A GOOD HOME. Fools will not be suffered, but he seems to make an exception when a snooty well-dressed woman arrives at the gnomeatorium to recruit Gadacz for a dirty job that someone’s gotta do, and he’s the perfect guy to gotta do it: Figure out who committed a nasty bank robbery-slash-homicide. The bank is going to be privatized in two weeks, so he’s got a deadline, and if he succeeds, he gets his job back and his reputation polished. And if he fails, well, at least the rest of the cops have an easy scapegoat, one who has a past that has something to do with the old communist regime. Hmm.

Gadacz accepts. The gnome biz must not be particularly satisfying. He meets his partner on the case, Janicka (Wiktoria Gorodeckaja), and they step through the crime scene. Three women, bank employees, are dead. Blood all over the place. Some cash is gone, but it doesn’t seem like enough to justify executing people like that. Gadacz looks around, notices things others don’t, asks questions others don’t, finds a fourth body that others didn’t, a security guard stuffed in the ventilation system. The perp? Wasn’t alone, Gadacz insists. Had to be others. There’s evidence. That hadn’t occurred to anyone else yet. The guy’s a good detective. There are leads to follow. Witnesses to be interviewed. Grieving friends and family to be questioned. Bases to be covered. Legwork to be, uh, legged. 

Gadacz takes people back to the police station to be interviewed across the room from a piranha tank. Piranha? In the cop shop? Sure. It’s dramatic. Symbolic. One of the cops drops some stringy flesh in the tank and the fish swarm it and there’s Kacper (Jedrzej Hycnar) glancing at lunchtime over his shoulder. Gadacz hauled him in because he was supposed to be the security guard on duty that day, but he traded shifts with the other guy and now the other guy is kaput. Kacper has an alibi and his two pals, Bartek (Lukasz Szczepanowski) and Marek (Stanislaw Linowski), corroborate it. A few key things we learn: Kacper has a kid sister who he can’t take care of, so she’s being adopted by a nice family. Janicka has been asked by her bosses to snitch on Gadacz. And Gadacz, well, he has some unorthodox methods that don’t quite fit in with police procedure. “Gadacz is a son of a bitch,” goes one of Gadacz’s former supervisors, “but he’s my son of a bitch.” Are we about to see him be a son of a bitch? Seems like it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This chilly-weather procedural brought to mind The Snowman if it was smartly executed instead of laughably clunky.

Performance Worth Watching: Lubaszenko doesn’t speak much, but says a lot with his gruff, disheveled mannerisms – enough to give us a hint of Gadacz’s true nature, and build to a well-earned, terrifically understated monologue during the denouement that helps justify why we just watched this specific story.

Memorable Dialogue: A line via Janicka that sums up how her and Gadacz’s jobs don’t allow them to have much of a family life: “That’s what we are – not enough.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: What does it take to endure man’s inhumanity to man in pursuit of the thing in the movie title? That’s the primary question we face when Justice finally coalesces thematically, and reveals that it’s essentially about the sacrifices some people must make in order to tip the scales at least slightly towards fairness in a society where desperation and cruelty run rampant. Like I said, it’s a dirty job.

The screenplay – written by Dana Lukasinska and Bartosz Staszczyszyn – sometimes struggles to make this theme coherent, especially within the relatively simplistic character constructs here: The grizzled and cynical veteran cop, the younger protege-type alongside him, the suspect saddled with a tragic youth. But Justice isn’t at all structured like a whodunnit, so it’s obviously got a bigger goal in mind than guiding us through twists and revelations. It’s a subtle procedural that’s reasonably engrossing thanks to Gazda’s keen pacing, tone-setting and development of setting. The director doesn’t twist the screws in an artificial manner, preferring to hew closer to realism than sensationalism. This doesn’t result in an intently suspenseful narrative, but it helps us realize that, sometimes, it’s not about what the characters do but how they do it that defines who they are. 

Our Call: The unorthodox, low-key approach to the material might not work for everyone, but Justice offers enough dramatic potency and observational acumen to satisfy those who get to its final scenes. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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