The first season of The Mire (originally titled Rojst), a Polish-language political crime drama set in 1985, was aired in Poland in 2018 and picked up by Netflix in 2019. Director Jan Holoubek and his co-screenwriter Paweł Maślona sold directly to the streaming giant a sequel that eclipses the original episodes with bolder character and plot development and much-needed historical contextualization. This second season, titled The Mire ’97 to signal the passage of twelve years since season one, was released in July 2021, and blends familiar crime drama conventions with revelatory themes for primarily non-Polish audiences. The Mire is worth the brooding, puzzling wade. The Mire ’97 delivers a satisfying approximation of an impossible present and potent glimpses of a painful, complicated past.
“The mire” in each season's title refers to the bog-riddled forest and horrific history surrounding an unnamed town in Silesia, territory that Poland “recovered” from Germany after Iosif Stalin blackmailed western Allies into moving Polish borders west. The location scouters, set and costume designers, and cinematographers meticulously recreated a late communist-era Poland with soot-stained housing blocks and state-monopoly signage and a newly independent Poland after the “flood of a millenium” swept through the nation's southwest. To capture 1997, the film crew contrasted new capitalist ostentation with flood-ruined furniture and household belongings piled up along the town's still wet roads. The film crew integrated footage from sites in Warsaw, Wrocław, Katowice, Racibórz, Zabrze, and elsewhere to evoke convincing 1980s and 1990s Polish worlds—including the neon letters of the “Hotel Centrum” atop the town's tallest building where the “u” alone keeps flickering.
The casts of The Mire and The Mire ’97 are top-notch as well. In the first season, male journalists seem primed to act as the muckraking heroes, with Andrzej Seweryn as Wanycz, a cynical experienced reporter, and Dawid Ogrodnik as young Zarzycki, too reckless to dive into investigative journalism without serious repercussions. Alas, two fine actresses are sidelined as partners—the honest prostitute Nadia (Agnieszka Żulewska) who wants to escape west with Wanycz, and Zarzycki's educated, exasperated pregnant wife (Zofia Wichłacz). The season kickstarts conventionally with the discovery of two bodies—those of a young prostitute and a bigwig communist party director of a youth athletic club. Both Wanycz and Zarzycki uncover the shocking truth in very different, but equally dangerous ways—the club director sexually abused young female athletes at his club—but the press can bring no one to justice. The Polish secret police still exercised exclusive power to disappear opponents. Zarzycki and family race home to the safety of Kraków. A wounded Wanycz retreats into makeshift retirement, undone by his investigation of a lovely teenager who was raped—either by the club director or a vicious classmate—and consequently committed suicide with her reclusive, artistic boyfriend.
In The Mire ’97, the corpse belongs to a twelve-year-old boy apparently drowned in the floods. Wanycz remains in place and Zarzycki returns as the paper's new editor. But the journalists yield their roles as heroes to police sergeants played by Magdalena Różczka and Łukasz Simlat in career-best performances. The Mire ’97 leaps ahead of the first season to take its place among the good cop crime dramas of the 2010s and 2020s. Różczka's Sergeant Anna Jass, mysteriously transferred from her Warsaw post, differs from her obstructive supervisors in her intelligent, relentless pursuit of the suspects (the drowned boy was murdered) and as a female officer who is a discreet lesbian of Roma descent. Simlat's Sergeant Adam Mika, a married local, is relentlessly teased by his colleagues for his stammer and spurned by Jass but ultimately proves to be the pragmatic partner she desperately needs.
While Jass and Mika apprehend the murderer, the hallmark crime drama ending, Zarzycki persuades Wanycz to write his story of the wartime “mire,” scenes of which are reenacted in the episodes. Wanycz remembers how the forested marshlands became killing grounds when the Germans built slave labor factories and camps there for local Poles, sites the Red Army subsequently appropriated for the execution of German men and the mass rape of German women and girls. For its non-Polish viewers, The Mire ’97 presents an encapsulated introduction to the Silesian traumas hitherto personalized in the reportaż of Małgorzata Szejnert and Magdalena Grzebałkowska and stylized as Gothic or decadent horror in the novels of Joanna Bator and Marek Krajewski. Here's hoping that other talented Polish directors and film crews keep digging in Silesia.
