Polish purveyor of graphic screen gore Patryk Vega unleashes another tide of visceral mayhem
Patryk Vega is the Polish writer-director whose muscular commercial ventures – spin-offs from TV hit Pitbull, medical procedural Botoks – have become appointment viewing for diaspora audiences and thus regular guests in the UK Top 10. Not for nothing does the logo for his production shingle Vega Investments feature a charging bull. His latest – translating, somewhat ominously, as The Plagues of Breslau – is a flat-out serial-killer thriller, 90 blood-spattered minutes that make those carefully designed Scandi crime dramas seem fussy and wussy. It opens with the graphic autopsy of an abattoir worker who was branded before being sewn alive into suffocating cow hide, the sole visual relief being a cutaway to the morgue’s greasy helix of flypaper. Everything that follows is similarly strong meat.
It has, however, been infused with an eccentric-to-distinctive local flavour. Where western variations generally feature chiselled, photogenic protagonists, Vega’s cops all appear to have been sleeping rough in their cars. Lead detective Helena Rus (Małgorzata Kożuchowska) might resemble an eastern European Jane Tennison were she not perpetually tired and crying, and operating beneath an undercut even Lisbeth Salander might think a little unforgiving. The superior parachuting in to oversee her investigation (Daria Widawska) arrives not in a power suit, but sweatpants and a sour expression. She does possess unexpected physiotherapy talents, though, and vital intel that suggests the killer is following Frederick the Great’s model in purging Silesia of its predators and degenerates.
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