The Mire

NETFLIX: The Mire (Rojst) | Trailer (English dub)
An odd little crime drama, set in a small town in Poland in the 1980's, so before the fall of the USSR and the Soviet apparatus is still in charge. We've got a grizzled old reporter who is planning his escape to Berlin and we have a new kid who has come to this small town from Krakow to get out from under his father who is some kind of party honcho. Like I said, it's a small town and like any small town, nothing ever happens but all of sudden we have two separate incidents resulting in four deaths. The police have both cases sewn up immediately, but there are a few loose threads and our reporters start pulling on them. The younger one right away, but the veteran gets dragged in as well. The veteran knows better, the police have 'solved' the case and nothing is going to change the official version of the crime, but there are too many connections to people he knows.

The forest where everybody dies has a bad reputation that it acquired back in the bad old days (during the tail end of WW2 maybe) when everyone in town was locked up in a camp in the forest. Details are vague, I suppose it's meant to give kind of a creepy feel to the show, but the present day bullshit of the police state kind of pushes it into the background.

The setting feels authentic, everyone smokes, the only nice buildings are the official ones, cars are ratty junkers. The veteran reporter wears an old army field jacket, which seems like a useful thing to wear while out tramping around in the woods, but provides a sharp contrast when he goes to visit the judge in the courthouse.

The Polish names gave us some trouble. It made keeping all of the characters straight a bit of a chore. Mostly we just used their job titles to indicate who we were talking about. 

5 episodes about 45 minutes each. We watched it in original language (Polish, presumably) with English subtitles.