BLOODY PLUMBERS:

Now rentable on iTunes, Amazon and other VOD platforms for $5.99, "The Last Witness" is a narrative film about the Katyn massacre of 1940. This joint Polish-British production is well worth seeing both for its dramatic power and for its probing examination of how England served Stalin's Great Russian chauvinism by covering up the massacre that left 22,000 elite members of the military, academy, church and legal professions secretly buried in the forest near Smolensk, even after the Cold War had begun. [...]

Wajda's film was made from the perspective of a Polish officer eventually killed in Katyn while "The Last Witness", set in 1946, is from that of a British journalist named Stephen Underwood (Alex Pettyfer) who is puzzled by the suicide epidemic of Poles who have ended up in displaced persons camps in England after the war has ended. This leads Underwood to begin asking questions among the interned men, including one who turns out to be a Russian peasant who ended up witnessing the executions. Appalled by the killings, he assumed the identity of a Pole named Michael Loboda (Robert Wieckiewicz) and fled to England where he becomes the eponymous "last witness".

Sensing that Loboda is hiding something, Underwood uses his access to the camp (his brother is an officer there) and purloins a journal that Loboda salvaged from a mass grave in Katyn. It is filled with details about the killings, the same device Wajda used in "Katyn". Letters that the doomed Polish officer wrote to his wife end up being used to reconstruct war crimes. Both films use archival footage of disinterred corpses to lend the realism needed to remind an audience of the needless brutality Stalin was capable of.

Underwood's investigative reporting leads the forces of reaction in England to try silencing both the reporter and Loboda by any means necessary. Paul Szambowski's screenplay co-written with director Piotr Szkopiak sustains considerable tension as the noose tightens around both men in a fashion that evokes a John le Carré film. The higher up you get in the British state and military, the more you run into rationales for officialdom's malfeasance. The film has a noir aesthetic that matches well to the immediate post-war malaise, capturing the same mood as Orson Welles's "The Third Man".

While focused on a distant period, the filmmakers obviously hope to reflect on anti-Polish xenophobia present now in England. When Underwood is having a drink in a pub, he spots Loboda for the first time standing at the bar trying to get his mind off Katyn and displacement by sipping quietly on a beer. When his Slavic accent is noticed by an Englishman standing close by, he is told to go back where he came from and to stop stealing their jobs.

While the Soviet government is obviously determined to keep its responsibility for Katyn a secret by continuing to put the blame on the defeated Nazi state, the British Labour Government comes in a close second.

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