Last night at the Academy Awards, the Iranian film, “A Separation,” won the best foreign film prize. The Polish film, “In Darkness,” did not win, even though it is an important film about the Holocaust. I imagine Malgorzata Bakalarz, a Polish art historian studying sociology in New York, is pleased. -Jeff

I remember the joke among my friends – photographers and filmmakers – repeated each time when someone would read a film review in a newspaper. “Why are all the film critics unemployed in Poland? – Because sociologists and historians write better film reviews. – And why’s that? – Because it’s all about important movies, not the good ones.”

Indeed, “important” is not a formal category for judging a film, and it should not be a category to discuss “In Darkness” by Agnieszka Holland, either. Holland depicts a true story about Leopold Socha, Polish sewage worker, who saved a group of Jews, hiding them in sewage in Lviv (now in Ukraine). And yet many reviewers were terrorized by the importance of the content and do not really address the form. Is it really so that to watch films touching on important issues one needs to become “a patriot,” “a pacifist,” or “anti-Fascist” instead of remaining simply “a viewer”? And why does a critique of a film on Holocaust seem to be anti-Semitic? The terror of “important movies” is truly a noteworthy phenomenon.

“In Darkness” is not a masterpiece, no matter how important its subject. In it, Holland, the distinguished Polish director, is guilty of the sin of excess (or indecisiveness): among many different angles of the story and many ways of telling it – she has chosen everything. The effect is a lot of unnecessary scenes that make the large picture (sic!) blurry. Should we fully recognize the main protagonist’s transformation, from a crook that wants to get rich on others’ tragedy into a righteous gentile? Or, rather, should we meditate on complex dynamics between the group of Jews – fled from the ghetto to be forced to select among themselves the ones who would die, the “selected” fleeing . . .

Read more: The Terror of Important Films: “In Darkness” (Spoiler Alert)