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Despite my initial excitement for In Darkness, Agnieszka Holland’s Oscar-nominated depiction of a Polish man’s real-life efforts to save a group of Jewish people during World War II, I could not help but feel a tinge of disappointment when the film ended.

Holland knows that a film set during the Holocaust inherently evokes a sense of acute, almost sickeningly unbearable injustice in the mind of the viewer. With this in mind, she presents the story with a blunt, eastern European lack of embellishment. The film’s lynchpin, Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), is a part-time burglar who encounters a group of Jewish exiles fleeing the ghetto. Ever the opportunist, Socha offers his help for a price, hiding the exiles from the Nazis in the city’s labyrinthine drainpipes. Holland starkly chronicles their lives over the next 14 months—the Jews, living with the incessant fear of capture, and Socha, somehow transforming from greedy thief to selfless guardian. The film’s events need no maudlin adornments to evoke indignation and despair: a German soldier laughs as he rips off a middle-aged Jew’s beard on the morbidly grey streets of the ghetto, brandishing it like a scalp; the depiction of a young woman giving birth in the dark, putrid tunnels below the city’s cathedral, biting down on a filthy rag to swallow her screams, is even more visceral. Apart from several small inconsistencies, the score emphasizes these scenes perfectly. Despite scant mention of religion in the film, the music can be an eerie reminder of the root cause of Jewish exceptionalism in a changing Europe. As children play, and life in the dark sewers drags along, the prayer of an orthodox man in soiled ritual garb and phylacteries fills the shot.

Despite a strong performance by Wieckiewicz, whose corpulent build and expressive demeanor might remind one of a no-nonsense uncle, the script hampers the viewer’s connection with the film. Instead of an astute look at a circumscribed set of characters, Holland tries to do too much, and thereby neglects to address a number of salient questions. How is it that a man who is comfortable scavenging the houses of the taken and the dead, for example, who happily punches a German boy in the opening sequence, grows to repeatedly risk his own life to save a handful of Jews who struggle to pay him?

This lack of depth is noticeable through the film, which foregoes the psychological exploration of individuals and events necessary for us to establish the most direct and immediate connections with the scenario. The pervading sense that we are watching the horrific events of the shamefully recent past has, to a degree, allowed Holland to omit the more subtle aspects of a poignant picture. This reliance on a sense of history to provide the necessary emotional cache is commonplace, but I cannot help but be somewhat reproachful—one comes away with an artificial sense of having truly understood the lives of people whose presence on screen was, in actuality, superficial.

A story of life during one of the worst tragedies of the twentieth century surely deserves more than that.