Heweliusz

The Heaviness of the Tide

Water has a memory, or at least that is what we tell ourselves when the institutions meant to protect us suddenly develop amnesia. Jan Holoubek's *Heweliusz*—a five-episode Netflix drama reconstructing the fatal 1993 sinking of a Polish roll-on/roll-off ferry in the Baltic Sea—understands this intimately. I have seen plenty of disaster epics that treat mass destruction as a spectator sport. This is not one of them. Instead, it plays out like a grim procedural of grief, dissecting how a tragedy of this scale does not just happen because of hurricane-force winds, but because of deferred maintenance and the bureaucratic instinct to cover one's tracks.



Holoubek has a peculiar talent for digging around in the muck of Poland's recent past. He did it with the 1997 floods in *High Water*, and here he turns his lens on the post-communist transition of the early nineties—a time when the state was supposedly reinventing itself but still operated with old-school Soviet opacity. The entire series is drenched in a bruised palette of deep greens and oceanic blues. There is barely a ray of actual sunlight across the whole runtime. I am usually allergic to such heavy-handed color grading, finding it a little cheap. Still, here, it traps you. You feel the cold, salty dampness in the bones of every scene, whether the characters are struggling in the Baltic or sitting in a sterile courtroom in Warsaw.

The actual sinking is agonizing to watch. In the second episode, there is a sequence where the ship's fatal tilt—the list—becomes irreversible. Holoubek does not rely on chaotic fast cuts to manufacture panic. He just lets the camera sit inside the cargo hold as heavy trucks snap their chains and slide toward the starboard wall, screeching against the metal. It is a mechanical death rattle. You watch the geometry of the room betray the people inside it. The sheer tactile terror of that sequence easily rivals anything HBO managed with *Chernobyl*, mostly because the terror is so horribly quiet before the water finally bursts through.



Still, the storm is only the prologue. The meat of the series lies in the dry-land aftermath, anchored by a fiercely restrained performance from Michał Żurawski as Piotr Binter, an off-duty captain and friend to the man who went down with the ship. Żurawski carries himself with a rigid, almost punishing stillness. Watch his shoulders when he is being stonewalled by investigators. They do not hike up in anger; they slump, as if the physical weight of the bureaucracy is literally pushing him into the floor. He is countered beautifully by Konrad Eleryk, playing a traumatized survivor. Eleryk’s eyes constantly dart around, completely untethered from the present moment. His physical fragility is a sharp, nervous contrast to Żurawski's dense, immovable guilt.

I just wish the series trusted its own pacing all the way to the finish line. The first few episodes are a methodical, slow-burn interrogation of systemic failure, building a tremendous amount of tension. Then we hit the supersized 81-minute finale, and things get uncharacteristically clumsy. Years of complex courtroom battles and political scapegoating are shoved into a blender, leaving multiple character arcs dangling in the wind. Whether this rushed conclusion was a budget constraint or a creative misstep, I am not entirely sure. It dulls the emotional impact of the final frames.



Still, even with its structural wobbles, the show manages to find its human core. As Joel Keller wrote for Decider, "As the disaster gives way to the aftermath, we hope that *Heweliusz* becomes more about closure than about death". The series ultimately honors that hope, though it never pretends closure is easy or clean. It is a messy, frustrating fight against a system that would rather let the dead take the blame than admit its own rot. I walked away from the screen feeling exhausted. Which is, perhaps, exactly what a story about fighting the tide is supposed to do.