Mroki
A Polish fantasy film that treats reality like a trap — and makes you believe it.
Mroki is a 2026 Polish drama-fantasy directed by Bartosz Szyszko that operates on a deceptively simple premise: a young acting student gets cast in a television production and can't get out. Not because of a contract. Because the show's logic starts overwriting his own. It's adapted from Jarosław Borszewicz's cult novels Mroki and Pomroki, and what Szyszko's done with the material is genuinely unsettling — the kind of film that makes you question which scenes were "real" inside the story, and which were performance, and whether that distinction even matters anymore by the end.
Runtime: 88 minutes | Release: June 11, 2026 | Lead: Hubert Miłkowski
Why this film matters: the premise
The story hinges on something that sounds simple until you sit with it. A young man — desperate to hold onto someone he loves — accepts a role in a surreal, psychedelic TV show. The show has its own internal logic, its own rules, and those rules don't follow reality as he understands it. The longer he stays, the harder it gets to remember which version of him is the character and which is the actor. By the climax, that line doesn't just blur. It disappears.
What's striking is that Szyszko refuses to make this comfortable. There's no grand reveal where everything snaps back into focus. The acting student isn't heroic—he's reactive, confused, often frustrating to watch. That feels intentional. Miłkowski leans into the confusion rather than fighting it, which makes the performance land in a way that's rare in films that play with reality-bending concepts. There's a scene—difficult to describe without spoiling the mechanics—where he has to perform sincerity while the fictional TV camera watches him do it, and the layers of performance-watching-performance create something genuinely vertiginous.
The supporting cast—particularly Sebastian Fabijański and Sonia Bohosiewicz—bring a quality of knowing menace that keeps you guessing about whose side anyone's actually on. Honestly, that ambiguity is the whole game.
Where Mroki came from: production and adaptation
This is a Polish production from three entities: Sfilmowani Aktorstwo, chili.limono, and AD i Media Group. Bartosz Szyszko wrote and directed—a dual role that, when it works, gives a film rare coherence of vision. According to Filmweb's listing, the film premiered on June 11, 2026 and already carries at least one award nomination. That's a meaningful signal for a debut feature working in genre territory that Polish cinema doesn't visit often.
The source material matters here. Borszewicz's novels have a cult following in Poland—they're psychedelic, reality-blurring, deliberately disorienting. Translating that into a visual medium could've gone wrong in a dozen ways. The fact that it didn't is partly because Szyszko understood what made the books work and didn't try to "clarify" them for film. He let them stay strange.
The cast and why it works
Hubert Miłkowski carries the center—a young man perpetually off-balance, never quite sure which version of reality he's operating in.
The ensemble supporting him:
- Martyna Byczkowska
- Sebastian Fabijański
- Beata Fudalej
- Sonia Bohosiewicz
- Magdalena Celmer
- Piotr Napierała
- Bartłomiej Deklewa
That's substantial casting for 88 minutes, and Szyszko uses it strategically. Some of these actors feel like anchors to the real world (or what the character thinks is real). Others feel like they belong entirely to the show-within-the-film. Whether that's intentional blurring or just the nature of the source material is one of the more interesting things to watch for.
What makes Mroki different from other European fantasy films
The fantasy elements here aren't soft or whimsical. They're closer to the uncanny—familiar things slightly wrong, environments that shift without announcing themselves. That's harder to pull off than outright spectacle. Most films either commit to full fantasy world-building or they don't. Mroki lives in the crack between. The psychedelic TV production has its own logic, and that logic is consistent within itself—which is what makes it so unsettling when it contradicts the real world around it.
Look—the thing nobody mentions about films like this is that they rely entirely on whether you trust the central actor to make the confusion feel genuine rather than just sloppy. Miłkowski does that work. You believe his bewilderment because it's not performed confusion. It reads like someone genuinely trying to hold onto their sense of self while the ground shifts beneath them.
How to watch: where and when
Mroki is currently available on major OTT services. The quickest way to check what's available in your region is Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker—it pulls live data so you're not chasing dead links. The film launched theatrically in June 2026 and is now moving through its standard VOD window.
Streaming availability for international titles like this can shift depending on regional licensing deals. Rather than listing individual platforms here (which become outdated fast), Movie OTT aggregates platform data in real time. Check there first—it'll save you ten minutes of clicking.
Who should watch this
Mroki is for viewers with patience for ambiguity. It won't hand you a clean resolution, and it's not trying to. If you've got an appetite for European genre cinema that takes its literary source material seriously—if you found yourself drawn to films where the architecture of reality becomes part of the story—this is 88 minutes worth spending.
Think of it as the kind of film that stays with you not because you understand it completely, but because you're not entirely sure you do. That's the whole point.
FAQ
Q: Is Mroki family-friendly?
No. It's a drama-fantasy with psychological complexity and unsettling themes. Not for young viewers.
Q: Do I need to have read Borszewicz's novels first?
No. The film stands on its own. Having read them might deepen certain moments, but it's not required.
Q: When should I watch this?
When you're alert. Not background-viewing material. Mroki demands attention.
Q: Where can I find current streaming info?
Movie OTT tracks all major platforms here, updated as titles move between services.
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