‘Wild, Wild East’ review: Second World War thriller set in occupied Poland starts forceful but can’t sustain its intrigue | Reviews

Dir: Jan Holoubek. Poland 2026. 108mins 

February 1943, on the eastern borderlands of the General Government of Poland. A rider dressed in black arrives in a miniature, desolate town in the dead of winter. His name is Martin Wolff (Itay Tiran), and he’s been dispatched by Berlin to investigate some irregularities regarding a disappeared wealthy local lawyer, Levi. In reality, Wolff is searching for Levi’s gold. The frigid, bleak Nazi-era genre picture Wild, Wild East captivates when it plays cat and mouse, inspiring Wolff to fight for survival against his many wealth-seeking adversaries, but falters when the travesties to which it alludes become literal. 

Weighty, glacial mystery thriller

Directed by Jan Holoubek, whose prior films Doppelgänger (2023) and 25 Years Of Innocence (2020) freely played with twisted truths and mistaken identities, Wild, Wild East premieres in Toronto’s Platform section. Produced by Klaudia Śmieja-Rostworowska (The Testament of Ann Lee) and Ewa Puszczyńska (The Zone of Interest) the film recalls many components of the Western – wide empty streets, hushed secrets whispered around hazardous corners, archtypes like the town drunk and roaming outlaws. Intermingling World War II with the specter of the Holocaust, this weighty, glacial mystery thriller, which also boasts plenty of action sequences and survivalist intrique, is a genre-bending film which should have wide appeal.

The quality of Wild, Wild East initially matches its intriguing premise. Holoubek and his DoP Bartek Kaczmarek frame Wolff with imposing hero shots, allowing his lean physique to carve out gloomy silhouettes. Tiran’s cutting visage provides further intensity to these evocative frames, especially as Wolff looms over town. During his stay he interrogates Kaim (Robert Więckiewicz), an administrator tasked with maintaining the homes of deported Jewish citizens, Kaim’s grief-stricken wife Helena (Magdalena Różczka), who wonders about the fate of their 16-year-old son who left for the front years ago, and also Kuliś (Piotr Trojan) and his wife (Joanna Kulig). The latter couple suspiciously live with their children in Levi’s former offices.  

Though Wolff attempts to conduct his business quietly, several people take notice of him. There’s Kurt (Jan Bülow), a possibly queer Nazi officer who was a hairdresser before the war – he tries to play tennis with Wolff in a former synagogue, attempting to engage him in tortured conversations about Jewish art. There’s also three goons working Kaim’s illicit vodka distillery, a towering Ukrainian outlaw and an innkeeper who spends his days sketching a graphic novel about the Holocaust. They all provide spikes of curiosity for this observant protagonist.   

Aleksandra Takuska’s screenplay lays just enough bread crumbs to elicit our suspicions about Wolff. Who sent him and how does he know about the hidden gold? But Takuska is careful not to give away the entire surprise. Instead, we’re engrossed in the acutely calibrated mood of the picture, which gives these derelict homes where Jewish people once lived, the frozen streets they once walked on, a tactile meaning, the solemnity of which is only broken through a flurry of shootouts and bloody killings.

But Holoubek betrays the film’s thematic quietness in a climax that basically serves as a literal tour through the Holocaust experienced by Wolff. A final self-flagellating scene adds the further symbolic nail of train rumbling away, further undermining a film that had, up until that point, found strength in its opaqueness.