The global repository of second world war stories continues to replenish itself, and Polish director Robert Glinski’s new drama, charging around after a pair of youthful saboteurs undermining the German occupation, initially appears one of the more sexed-up. Yet this adaptation of Aleksander Kamiński’s on-the-spot 1943 novel uses the strained friendship between headstrong Janek (Tomasz Ziętek) and practical Tadeusz (Marcel Sabat), and the latter’s fraught relationship with the group’s handlers, to work up questioning perspectives on the act of sabotage; for all the flashythrills and spills initiated by what’s effectively a paramilitary scout troop, Glinski presents wartime heroism as a shifting, complex concept.
That English-language title feels grandiose for what boils down to a contained, vaguely pulpy rescue-and-revenge mission, but – thanks in part to Krzysztof Szpetmański’s razor-sharp cutting – it remains a sleek and watchable history, possessed of a bristling energy lacking in, say, Suite Française or Woman in Gold.
