Znaki (Signs)

I don't know why I started watching the Polish thriller series Signs on Netflix. Part of me wishes I hadn't, especially with how season two ended (and two seasons may be all there will be.) Yet it was so odd, intriguing and yet painfully out of step with basically every other thriller series in the world I thought I should write about the experience.

At first you think the story is about the murder of a young woman in the mountain town of Sowie Doły. When another young woman is murdered the same way ten years later, newly-arrived police commissioner Michał Trela (bravely and interestingly depicted by Andrzej Konopka) opens an investigation, He knows his lead female detective's husband was having an affair with the dead woman, and there are obvious ties to the old murder, so do they have a very slow serial killer in town?

No one really likes Trela except the female lead detective (played brilliantly by Helena Sujecka) and his sweet but haunted daughter Nina (also beautifully portrayed by Magdalena Żak), and there are obviously secrets and conspiracies all over this place, including a cover-up of a WWII atrocity and a buried treasure of Nazi Wunderwaffe plans or artifacts. Then it gets even more strange toward the end of season one, when nothing is resolved and Trela's daughter is abducted.

Problems: there's a long list of inconsistencies, dropped plot lines, inexplicable character 360s and missing info vital to understanding what's happening in Season one. Season two only piled on more questions atop what I already had, and ended viciously (at least in regard to the sympathetic viewers who stuck it out like me.) Spoiler: without warning the actor playing Trela does a pretty abrupt full body nude scene in a Season two episode, so you have been warned. The Nazi subplot gets even more bizarre, if possible, and then people seem to die and then don't die and then die again. Or maybe not. By the end of the final episode available I was thoroughly confused. This would never make it to television here because it's too weird.

Having griped about all that, I thought parts of Signs offered some of the most unique storytelling I've seen in series in a long time. Every single character had a necessary-to-the-story purpose, even if it wasn't fulfilled or explained properly, and that was refreshing. The Nazi buried treasure element was pretty interesting, if disjointed and messy. Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik played a secondary character (crazy old lady Zofia Bławatska, the mother of the first victim killed in the past) with absolute perfection, and was such and interesting character I mainly stuck around to watch her. I thought the ending of the second season sucked, though, and made no sense, and you probably will, too. If you can put up with all that, Signs might be a series that you want to see, if you're that much of a masochist. Available on Netflix.