Adrian Panek’s adaptation of Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak’s bestseller pairs a rookie prosecutor with the victim’s mother, a judge, and became Netflix’s most-watched non-English film in its first week.

Colors of Evil: Red is a Polish crime thriller that Netflix released worldwide on 29 May 2024. Directed by Adrian Panek and adapted from the 2019 novel Czerwień by Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak, it opens with the body of a young woman on a Baltic beach and follows two very different people who refuse to accept the first answer they are given: a rookie prosecutor and the victim’s mother, who happens to be a judge. Its original title is Kolory zła. Czerwień, and it runs 112 minutes.

The setting is the Tricity, the urban strip on the Gulf of Gdańsk formed by Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia. The dead woman is identified as Monika Bogucka, daughter of Judge Helena Bogucka, and her lips have been torn away. The case lands on the desk of Leopold Bilski, a young public prosecutor, and the details quickly look familiar: a coroner notes that the killing resembles a murder committed fifteen years earlier, and the man convicted of that crime, Jakubiak, walked out of prison one week before Monika died.

For Bilski’s superiors, that is almost enough. A blood-stained shirt turns up in Jakubiak’s backyard, he is arrested, and the file seems ready to close. The trouble is that it all fits too neatly. Bilski keeps digging, and Helena Bogucka, who knows exactly how courts and police files work, starts asking her own questions in parallel, which makes her both his most useful ally and a witness with too much at stake.

The story also reconstructs the months before the murder. Monika had taken a job at the Dockyard, a nightclub owned by Kazar, a local gangster, and the investigation keeps leading back there: to drugs, to a police force that is not entirely clean, and eventually to Helena’s own home, where her husband Roman turns out to be hiding his ties to the club’s owner. The film is built as a whodunit, so it is better approached knowing only that much.

From a Tricity bestseller to the screen

Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak was born in Gdańsk in 1982 and sets her novels in the Tricity she grew up in. Czerwień, published by W.A.B. in 2019, was the first book in her Kolory zła (Colors of Evil) cycle, built around the prosecutors Leopold Bilski and Anna Górska. The series continued with Czerń in 2020 and Biel in 2021, which sold more than 100,000 copies, and a fourth volume, Żółć, arrived in 2024. By the time Netflix’s film went into production, the books already had a large crime-reading audience in Poland.

The screenplay is credited to Łukasz M. Maciejewski and Adrian Panek. Leszek Bodzak and Aneta Cebula-Hickinbotham produced through Aurum Film, with Netflix handling the worldwide release. The crew includes cinematographer Tomasz Augustynek and editor Piotr Kmiecik, and the score is by Bartosz Chajdecki, a Kraków composer best known in Poland for the music of the wartime series Czas honoru.

Adrian Panek’s turn to crime

Adrian Panek, born in Wrocław in 1975, came to directing from an unusual angle: he studied architecture at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology before training as a director at the University of Silesia in Katowice and at Andrzej Wajda’s Master School of Film Directing. His first feature, Daas (2011), a costume drama set in 1776 around the self-proclaimed messiah Jacob Frank, won the Andrzej Munk award for best directing debut. His second, Werewolf (Wilkołak, 2018), set in 1945 among children freed from the Gross-Rosen concentration camp and sheltered in a forest orphanage, earned him the best director award at the Gdynia Polish Film Festival.

Television had already taken him into police stories: he directed episodes of the crime series Komisja morderstw in 2016 and the series Powrót in 2022. Colors of Evil: Red was his first full-length crime thriller, and it arrived in the same year as Simona Kossak, his film about the Polish biologist, which also featured Jakub Gierszał and a score by Bartosz Chajdecki. For a director known for small, festival-oriented features, a Netflix procedural released in dozens of countries at once was a clear change of scale.

The cast

Jakub Gierszał plays Leopold Bilski. Born in Kraków in 1988, he made his screen debut in Jacek Borcuch’s All That I Love (2009) and broke through with Suicide Room (Sala samobójców, 2011), which brought him the Zbyszek Cybulski Award. He has worked in German-language cinema and in Hollywood, where he appeared in Dracula Untold (2014), and he spent four years on the legal series Chyłka (2018–2022) before playing the lead in the spy film Doppelgänger (2023).

Maja Ostaszewska plays Helena Bogucka. Born in Kraków in 1972, she made her film debut with a small role in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and has won two Polish Academy Awards (Orły) for her leading roles in Jack Strong and Body (Ciało). Since 2008 she has been part of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Nowy Teatr company in Warsaw, which makes her one of the most established stage and screen actors in the cast.

Zofia Jastrzębska, born in 1998, plays Monika. She was a recent graduate when Netflix gave her the lead role of Gita Burano in Infamy (Infamia, 2023), the first Polish series centred on the Roma community, and she also played one of the main roles in The Girl and the Astronaut the same year. The supporting cast includes Andrzej Konopka as the coroner Tadeusz Dubiela, Przemysław Bluszcz as Kazar and Andrzej Zieliński as Roman Bogucki.

A global hit and a sequel

The numbers made the film one of Netflix’s most visible Polish releases. According to the platform’s own weekly charts, Colors of Evil: Red was the most-watched non-English film on the service in its first week, with 19.9 million views between 29 May and 2 June 2024, and added 14.6 million in its second week. It reached number one in Poland, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, and stayed in the global non-English top ten for five weeks.

That run turned the novel series into a film franchise. Colors of Evil: Black (Kolory zła: Czerń), written and directed by Adrian Panek, arrived on Netflix on 10 June 2026, with Jakub Gierszał back as Bilski alongside Marianna Zydek and Andrzej Chyra. This time the prosecutor searches for a missing boy in Trulocz, a fictional Kashubian town modelled on Kartuzy and filmed in Gniew. The sequel opened at number one among non-English films with 14.1 million views, and pulled the first film back into the weekly top ten, two years after its release.

Colors of Evil: Red sits in a familiar tradition: a body, a suspect who is too convenient, and an investigation that ends up questioning the institutions supposed to solve the case. What separates it from many streaming procedurals is its origin in a popular Polish book series and its pairing of a newcomer prosecutor with a judge who is also a grieving mother. On paper, its plot moves through interviews, files and family secrets rather than chases, and its success on Netflix suggests a wide audience was happy to follow a case built that way.

Tags: Netflix, thrillers, Poland