During
the 1970s, miscarriages of justice were commonplace occurrences in Socialist
Poland. However, the stakes were particularly high for the police detective who
quite possibly railroaded a (maybe) innocent man for the crimes of “The Silesian
Vampire,” Poland’s first recorded serial killer. Questions remain decades later,
which Marciej Pieprzyca explores in his thinly fictionalized I’m a Killer (trailer here), a selection of
the 2018 Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles.
Living
in pre-Solidarity Poland was grim enough without a serial killer stalking
women. Despite the taunting letters the murderer sent to the police, the
authorities did not give the case priority, until he killed the niece of the
local Communist Party boss—or so many locals believed.
Regardless,
junior detective Janusz Jasinski is brought in to lead the reorganized investigation
shortly after her death. Frankly, he suspects he is being set up to be a
scapegoat and he is probably right, but his try-anything approach actually
produces a very credible suspect: bitter, wife-beating laborer Wieslaw Kalicki (a
fictional analog of Zdzislaw Marchwicki).
There
are plenty of reasons to dislike Kalicki and a fair amount of circumstantial
evidence, but nothing hard and physical ties him to the murders. Of course, Jasinski’s
task force has more than enough to bring him to trial under the old Communist
regime, but the man stubbornly refuses to confess. The brazen score-settling of
the witnesses called against him also troubles Jasinski, but his future depends
on Kalicki’s conviction. Nevertheless, he starts visiting Kalicki, partly to
provide some assistance to his family and partly to win the accused man’s trust—for
his own sake.
In
some ways, I’m a Killer is like the
true-crime series Netflix cranks out on a weekly basis, but the Communist era
setting makes everything more dangerous and dysfunctional. Pieprzyca clearly has
ideas regarding Kalikci/Marchwicki’s guilt or lack thereof, but there is
absolutely no ambiguity in his portrayal of the Communist-era legal system.
Through the initially well-intentioned Jasinski, we see how power begets
corruption, which breeds the cowardice and moral turpitude that will allow a
profound injustice to proceed to its tragic end.
Miroslaw
Haniszewski is quite remarkable as Jasinski, convincingly sliding down his
slippery slope character-development arc, from relatable everyman plugger to
sociopathic stooge. It is also almost as harrowing to watch Arkadiusz Jakubik’s
Kalicki crumble from a defiant proletarian with thuggish inclinations to a
completely hollow and broken man.