Colors of Evil: Black: Netflix sends prosecutor Bilski to a town that won’t say where its children went

The children go missing one at a time, in a Kashubian town small enough that everyone knows everyone and quiet enough that no one repeats what they know. A newly transferred prosecutor reads that quiet as evidence. The grief is real, but underneath it runs something colder and more useful to the town: an agreement about which questions are not asked. The agreement is older than the crime, and it will outlast the investigation.

That is the real subject of Colors of Evil: Black, and it is what separates the film from the case at its center. A disappearance can be solved. A place that has spent generations deciding not to look cannot be solved — it can only be exposed, and exposure is not the same as justice. The film knows the difference, and it builds its dread out of that gap rather than out of the usual machinery of a thriller.

Leopold Bilski returns, and Jakub Gierszał plays him the way he did before: a prosecutor whose stillness is its own kind of pressure, a man who lets a silence run long enough that someone fills it. The first film kept him on the Tricity coast. This one moves him inland, to Kartuzy, into the kind of town that treats an outside prosecutor as weather — something to wait out. The relocation is the point. Bilski is good at his job; the question the film keeps asking is whether being good at the job is enough when the obstacle is not a suspect but a consensus.

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He is not working alone. Marianna Zydek plays Ania Górska, an assistant prosecutor carrying her first serious case: a thirteen-year-old girl gone missing, and a community quick to file her under runaway rather than victim. Dividing the investigation between two prosecutors does something quietly radical for a genre built on lone intuition. The film stops watching a detective and starts watching an institution — two people inside the same office, applying the same procedure, hitting the same wall from different angles. The wall is the closed town, and it does not care which of them is asking.

If the first film introduced Bilski, this one assumes you already know him and asks a harder question about the world he works in. The escalation is not a bigger body count or a more baroque killer. It is a change of ground. The debut’s crime had the legibility of a city case — a victim, a coastline, a thread to pull. Here the case fragments across more than one disappearance and more than one generation, and the town answers every thread by tightening. The threat scales by becoming harder to locate, not louder.

Adrian Panek, who wrote and directed the first installment, keeps both jobs and uses the move inland to change the film’s whole texture. The coastal noir of the debut — wet light, open horizons — gives way to a village gothic of flat skies, old houses and treelines that seem to be keeping something. A local legend threads through the case, and Panek refuses to treat it as ornament. He lets folklore and forensics blur until they are hard to separate, because in a town like this the story people tell about the woods is also the instrument they use to avoid telling the truth about themselves. Call it folk-noir: a procedural where the most important evidence is a thing everyone believes and no one will say out loud.

That choice places the film inside a specific Polish appetite. The provincial kryminał — the crime story set not in the capital but in the small town that guards its own reputation — has become one of the country’s most dependable forms, on the bestseller lists and on the streaming dashboards alike. Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak’s trilogy supplies the literary spine; Kashubia, a region with its own language, its own folklore and a long habit of insularity, supplies the rest. The silence here is not a plot device. It reads as inherited — something passed down with the houses and the land, a debt no one living chose to take on but everyone keeps paying.

The pairing of Bilski and Górska gives the film its sharpest internal tension. He has learned, over one case already, how much these places will not give up; she is meeting that wall for the first time, with the conviction of someone who still believes procedure is enough. Their disagreement is never spelled out as a lecture. It plays as method — two people deciding, case by case, how hard to push a town that can outwait them both. The film lets the gap between experience and conviction do work that a voiceover would ruin.

This is where the film’s argument sharpens. Most thrillers locate evil in a person and then hunt that person until the hunt resolves the unease. Colors of Evil: Black puts the unease somewhere harder to arrest. The danger is distributed — across neighbors who look away, officials who manage rather than solve, families who decide that protecting the town’s name is a form of protecting their own. By the time Bilski and Górska understand the shape of what happened, the more disturbing recognition is how many ordinary people had to do nothing for it to keep happening.

What the case cannot answer — and the film is honest enough to leave it open — is whether a community that buried its own crimes can ever be made to account, or whether an outsider with a badge and a file simply moves the silence one town over. Bilski can close a disappearance. He cannot make a place confess to the thing it agreed, long ago, never to say. The film ends where that question begins, which is the right place for it to end.

There is a business story sitting underneath the dread, and it is worth naming. With Colors of Evil: Black, Netflix is no longer making a one-off Polish thriller; it is building a recurring prosecutor franchise out of a domestic bestseller. A returning lead changes the math. A standalone film has to win an audience from scratch every time; a series with a familiar investigator at its center carries viewers from one drop to the next and turns a national literary property into a renewable asset. That is a deliberate bet on how Netflix Poland keeps an audience between releases — and on the idea that a homegrown detective can hold a global platform’s attention the way an imported one used to.

It is a bet with precedent. Polish crime television — Rojst, Wataha, the run of Harlan Coben adaptations shot in Poland — has already shown that this register travels, that the provincial-secret procedural is legible far beyond its home market. Anchoring that register to a single recurring prosecutor is the next logical move, and Sobczak’s trilogy gives Netflix a built-in roadmap for where the character goes next.

Colors of Evil: Black arrives on Netflix on June 10, 2026. Adrian Panek directs from his own screenplay, adapting Sobczak’s novel; Jakub Gierszał and Marianna Zydek lead, with Andrzej Chyra, Robert Gonera, Beata Ścibakówna, Piotr Żurawski, Julian Świeżewski and Adam Bobik. It is the second film in the series, and on the evidence of where it takes Bilski, the franchise is less interested in catching one more killer than in mapping the quiet that lets killers keep their neighbors.

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Tags: Netflix

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