SERIES REVIEW – There are crime stories best enjoyed when you fully suspend disbelief and forget that anything like this could ever actually happen. If the protagonists are hunting evil in some far-flung, imaginary corner of the world, you might forgive a few absurdities – but when the fairy tale of serial murder is transplanted to the familiar shadows of your own neighborhood, the magic fades fast. Now streaming on SkyShowtime, Langer tries to be a Hollywood heavyweight with a Central European twist, but ends up as a bloodless, synthetic hybrid where unreality and limp clichés muddle together in spectacularly awkward fashion.

These kinds of crime tales, which demand extreme leaps of faith, work best as dark fables: stories set in places so remote or unknown that pop culture has already transformed them into myth. But when a Polish filmmaker (or anyone else) tries to root these same formulas in their own backyard, awkwardness is almost guaranteed. The more intimately we know the local realities, the more glaring the script’s blunders, the more obvious the cardboard cutouts and secondhand tropes. Langer charges right into both traps with breathtaking clumsiness.

Warsaw Noir, or When Comic Book Logic Takes Over

The Warsaw of this series simply doesn’t exist: it’s an abstract, surreal metropolis, a fever dream where an untouchable, cartoon-villain serial killer, Piotr Langer (Jakub Gierszał), faces off against two catastrophically inept policewomen, Siarka (Magdalena Boczarska) and undercover agent Nina (Julia Pietrucha), in a never-ending cat-and-mouse farce. Their years-in-the-making sting operation hinges entirely on one wildly optimistic gambit: Nina will seduce Langer – and that’s literally the whole plan. This only “works” because the script says so, and because Julia Pietrucha oozes the kind of dangerous allure that might just get a psychopath to drop his guard. Maybe one day, this Polish actress will finally get the femme fatale role she deserves.

Pietrucha is so captivating here, you almost forget she’s playing an amateurish cop with no credibility. But the avalanche of plot holes buries everything: Nina finds corpses in Langer’s apartment, uncovers a torture dungeon in his villa, witnesses a brutal assault, even extracts a confession from Langer about his first victim – yet somehow, the refrain is always “no evidence.” It never crosses her mind to save the kidnapped secretary, and nobody seems to care about the security footage of Langer’s driver abducting the girl from her office – as if everyone’s living in a cotton-candy dream. Her boss, Siarka, is no better: she sends Nina into the den of a woman-killing psychopath without any backup and botches her new identity so badly that Langer unravels it after three minutes on Google. The story runs on two tracks (following both killer and cops), but both are utterly disengaging: the police flail around, and Langer himself is blander than a chatbot’s out-of-office reply. I’m not saying evil always needs a backstory, but if your movie’s monster is this specific, at least offer a reason for his existence.

Pseudo-Noir, Plastic Swagger, and a Shredded Atmosphere

It’s not just the police duo flailing: the whole show, based on Remigiusz Mróz’s bestselling novels, is pure simulation – a serial killer drama where everything looks right, but nothing feels alive. Like Mróz’s books, the ingredients are all there, but the end product is hollow: just actors pacing through dusty sets. Dialogue is painfully inauthentic, the music is grating, tension is replaced by endless exposition, and the pacing is as jerky as a worn-out VHS tape. Four episodes in, you’ll still be wondering what the show is even about – aside from the urge to shock the audience at all costs. This is the kind of content that proves all those “boomer” clichés about toxic pop culture aren’t always wrong. Most disturbing of all, this is adapted from a hugely popular Polish book series, yet the violence is completely meaningless, presented with no purpose or moral reflection, just as empty set dressing. The creative intent is torn: they want both a Tarantinoesque, over-the-top killer and a dark, grown-up crime drama with real social bite.

Ironically, the child-abuse subplot could have anchored some social commentary – but even that lands limp. Nina’s son and his friend torture animals and upload the videos online, a potentially damning indictment of how easily such horror spreads in the digital age, and how utterly toothless the law is. Instead, we get a paper-thin script, woefully directed child actors, and adult characters who swallow every ridiculous lie. This storyline feels more like a patronizing morning show PSA than Haneke’s Benny’s Video. Maybe the last two episodes will hit us with a heavy-handed twist – “some people are just born evil” or “the monsters are among us, hiding in plain sight” – but I won’t be holding my breath.

Perfume-Commercial Vibes, Latex Luxury, and Hollow Perversion

There’s a whole extra layer here: the “romance.” The encounters between Julia Pietrucha and Jakub Gierszał, in glitzy venues and exclusive parties, sometimes resemble perfume commercials, other times a diet, straight-to-streaming remake of Fifty Shades. But Langer’s idea of romance is breaking bones with a hammer and having sex beside a bound, mutilated victim – fantasies so warped most viewers can only gape in disbelief. The love story is utterly arbitrary, and though there’s chemistry between the leads, everything remains strangely sexless – perhaps that’s why these two characters are actually the best part of the show.

I’ve already praised Pietrucha, and as for Gierszał, he seems well aware how weak this production is – he plays his villain with tongue firmly in cheek, all knowing grimaces and showy villainy. Sometimes it even works, and maybe by the end he’ll actually surprise us. As a case study in draining every drop of flavor from a popular book series to produce a tasteless, incoherent thriller, Langer is textbook. No amount of visual flair or committed acting can save a story this empty, rambling, and weightless. It’s one of the most pointless, chaotic thrillers of the year, and not even die-hard genre fans will be able to recommend it in good conscience.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-