A review of ‘The Last Witness’
A witness is someone with personal knowledge of an event who is able to recount what he or she knows. Some witnesses’ testimony is challenged successfully. Not all witnesses to an event want to recount their memories of what they saw, at least not under certain circumstances.
In the 2018 movie “The Last Witness,” directed by Piotr Szkopiak, Michael Loboda (played by Robert Wieckiewicz) is the eponymous witness (although the title is a double-entendre). Before long it becomes apparent why Loboda wants to keep what he knows to himself until the circumstances are right.
It’s a terrific movie. I saw it last night on hulu, and today looked it up on a couple of websites. Its Rotten Tomatoes ratings are just 29% on its tomatometer based on seven viewers’ reviews and a 60% audience score based on more than 50 ratings. Not high, so some will be disappointed.
The reviewers on imdb.com are sharply divided, but nearly all of the squibs are enjoyable and educational.
The protagonist in the movie, Stephen Underwood (Alex Pettyfer), reporter for a small newspaper, decides to check out a reported suicide. Write a few lines. But he quickly assumes it is not a suicide at all but a murder. The police call it suicide. His boss says forget it. “There’s no story here.” Do not write about it.
Underwood follows up anyway. Boy does he follow up.
A rule of thumb in writing movie reviews is not to give away too much about the plot; readers of this one will get hardly any of it. (People planning to see “The Last Witness” should not go near online reviews before seeing it.) Some will criticize the review you are reading for providing way too little of the plot.
Most Americans have never heard of the mass murders in 1940 in Poland known collectively as the Katyn massacre, although some facts about them became known a few years after they occurred. The site in Katyn forest was just one of where a series of such mass murders were committed.
Although the specific story in “The Last Witness” is fictional, the author of one commentary correctly calls it “a realistic view of what journalists can [do] and have done to bring the truth to light.” Another commentator writes, “It leaves you . . . pondering how farcical history can be.”
That said, this Wikipedia account of the series of Soviet NKVD mass murders lumped together under the title of “Katyn massacre” seems exhaustive. However, people who plan to see “The Last Witness” might want to wait until they have before reading it.