‘Wild Wild East’ Review: Jan Holoubek’s Nazi-Era Noir Western from Poland Loses Its Nerve

TIFF: The Polish director’s latest sets up a compelling moral morass but settles for easy answers to its thorny questions.

Jan Holoubek’s “Wild Wild East” begins in early 1943 with Nazi Germany already in decline, their invasion of the Soviet Union now a full quagmire sapping the overextended war power of men and materiel. Of course, Germans would have scarcely seemed diminished to those still under their occupation, such as the residents of the small, ransacked Polish village of Zalesie Małe.

To this hamlet comes Martin Wolff (Itay Tiran), a Nazi clerk dispatched to learn the whereabouts of a lawyer, Kowalski, rumored to have a trove of gold belonging to a Jewish family who have, one way or another, disappeared. Wolff arrives in a town that has been emptied of Jews and other undesirables, leaving vacant homes seized by SS officers and even some of the remaining locals. There is no sense of vicarious thrill to any of this squatting and looting — only a miserable will to cling to life in a town that has been drained of most of it.

Wolff exudes the banality of bureaucratized evil, never raising his voice when he interrogates villagers or even barks orders, but every request for accommodation or information is unmistakably a command. Even the Poles who can remain relatively calm around the man, such as the appointed “caretaker” of Kowalski’s abandoned manor, Kaim (Robert Więckiewicz), speak with a barely restrained tremor, speaking softly and concisely as if to not set off an avalanche with noise.

As Wolff scours Kowalski’s house and the surrounding area for the hidden gold, the film takes in the quiet devastation that has been wrought on the village. The larger homes of well-off Jews have been left with bare walls and floors, and anything that could not be toted off, like a piano, lies in ruins, destroyed out of spite. Bartek Kaczmarek’s cinematography captures this ruin in the dour palette of WWII dramas: buildings and interiors all look either ashen or wooden, with browns as dark as dried blood. The skies are so overcast they resemble a giant sheet of dirty ice, and the light through the windows is so bright and harsh that everyone inside is illuminated as if by an interrogation lamp.

The misery emanating from such images naturally weighs down the Poles, but it extends to the Nazis as well. All the cool authority that Wolff exudes to the locals dissipates instantly when he comes into contact with the local SS officers, who view his presence as an intrusion on their jurisdiction. One of the men, Kurt (Jan Bülow), takes a curious interest in Wolff, at first intimidating him and asking to see his papers but slowly growing closer to the clerk. Kurt’s friendliness rattles Wolff more than his veiled threats.

Showing off the headquarters they have mockingly set in the village synagogue, Kurt admits he finds the art on the walls and ceiling beautiful despite his avowed antisemitism. Sensing a test of some kind, Wolff only mutters his general disinterest in art of all kinds to sidestep the conversation. Given that Kurt is soon bound for the increasingly bleak Eastern Front, however, his confession (and his awkward attempt at connection) may well be genuine, but years of Nazi purity politics have turned every interaction into a game of Minesweeper where all parties cautiously mark off where they think the boundaries of acceptability are placed.

The paranoia setting in among the Germans is nothing, though, compared to the fear sown among the villagers, especially those seeking to combat their overlords. Holoubek fills “Wild Wild East” with tacit reminders of the complicity of Poles in helping their conquerors purge Jews, but the film’s most explicit commentary concerns the various resistance movements who operate in the village not in tandem but in outright opposition to each other as to the invaders.

Members of the Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian resistances all set upon Zalesie Małe and vie for the hidden gold for their own cause, forgoing solidarity and sharing resources with their ostensible allies to hoard the gains for themselves. Wolff himself becomes embroiled in this internecine conflict. Hints dropped throughout about discrepancies in his official facade — an accent other Germans cannot quite place, his protectiveness over his identification papers — snap into focus when a Ukrainian fighter, Biłasz (Oleksandr Yatsentyuk), confronts him amid the treasure hunt.

Once the twist is spelled out, the film’s intriguingly murky, bleak moral politics straighten into a much simpler thriller that clarifies the more heroic and self-centered figures among the anti-German contingents. The action, too, ramps up, shifting into a Leone-esque western complete with a climactic shootout in a cemetery that lets out the tension for a satisfying sense of victory. Only in the brief coda does “Wild Wild East” regain some of its early sense of unease when Holoubek throws in a parting reminder of why there is potential hidden gold to begin with, and how little any of the characters’ greedy, occasionally glorious antics matter to the millions already swept up in the chaos of the war.

Grade: C

“Wild Wild East” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.