Aahana Swrup
The Polish crime drama film ‘Justice’ follows the intense cat-and-mouse chase between a dejected police officer and his prime suspect. After a bank robbery leaves three dead, the local authorities call in Tadeusz Gadacz, a discharged police officer with a dark past. Consequently, the detective finds himself saddled with a younger partner, Aleksandra Janicka, and two weeks to catch the perpetrator. However, as the case unfolds, it becomes more and more evident that Tadeusz would be willing to bridge many lengths to reclaim his faded glory. Meanwhile, Kacper Surmiak, a guard at the bank, finds himself caught up in the investigation, compelling his life to spiral out of control.
The film sports a classic murder mystery that captures the audience’s attention from the start. As the plot progresses, Tadeusz’s legal proceedings and the motive behind the brutal murders take narrative focus, seamlessly inviting intrigue from the viewers. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Justice Plot Synopsis
After skirting a few departmental rules in his time, Tadeusz Gadacz now lives secluded from the city, selling sculptures from his cabin. Nonetheless, his past comes knocking on his door after a disastrous bank robbery threatens to be a PR nightmare for the police department. Thus, the state prosecutor reluctantly offers Tadeusz his old position back if he can solve this case with a time crutch. Once he arrives at the crime scene, fellow officers give him a rundown of the situation, and he deduces that Meitek—the missing guard on duty and the current prime suspect—is actually also dead. Furthermore, he learns about the bank’s disabled alarm system, which invites his suspicions.
As the investigation progresses, Tadeusz and his new partner, Aleksandra, begin interviewing the victims’ friends, family, and colleagues, bringing them to Kacper Surmiak. Kacper is the security guard who was supposed to be on duty on the day of the robbery but traded shifts with Meitek at the last second. For his part, the man sports a solid alibi since he attended his friend’s swearing-in ceremony at the army. Still, Tadeusz pays a visit to Bartek and Marek, Kacper’s two friends who accompanied him on the drive to the ceremony. Even though the three of them seem to have their stories straight, the officer remains suspicious of Kacper—more so when he learns that he was on duty when the bank manager turned off the alarm system.
As a result, Tadeusz decides to walk morally precarious roads and blackmail Kacper’s bank-ordered therapist into revealing details about their sessions. He takes things one step further and begins surveilling the suspect’s every move. Eventually, a charged confrontation between the two leads Kacper to confess his involvement in the crime. Nonetheless, Tadeusz remains stranded without actual evidence. While he snoops around Kacper’s alibi, Bartek starts to grow restless about his past actions after receiving photos of the victims from the detective. As a result, overtaken by guilt, the man considers confessing his crimes, which can only end badly for Marek and Kacper.
Therefore, once Kacper realizes that Bartek is on his way to the police station to confess, he intercepts his friend. However, instead of simply talking him down, Kacper resorts to intense solutions and ends up killing him in the woods. Although he makes the death look like a suicide, it doesn’t fool Marek, who grows agitated at his friend’s actions. Consequently, he tries to kill Kacper, which ends in his own death. However, with both of his friends dead and Tadeusz’s sharp attention on him, Kacper knows he can’t get away with the new murders that easily. Thus, he visits the police station and decides to make a confession of his own.
Justice Ending: What Was Kacper’s Motive?
Although the film establishes Kacper’s identity as the robber early into the story, it covets his motivations until the end. It’s easy to realize that part of his motives must stem from his desperate need for money. As an orphan, Kacper doesn’t have much family to speak of except for one younger sister, Ewa. After his mother committed suicide—in the wake of a failed business—the two siblings were put into an orphanage where the brother aged out of the system years before his sister. Although he attempted to get his act together enough to win custody of his sister, he could never quite manage the same.
As a result, Ewa ends up getting adopted out of the orphanage, leaving Kacper well and truly behind. For the same reason, he grew desperate to prove his capability as a caretaker and became desperate for financial stability. Once he learned about a lottery-winning shipment arriving at the bank where he worked, it was only a matter of time before he decided to carry out a robbery. Therefore, he planned out the perfect heist. He took care of every last detail, from an alibi to tricking his manager into turning off the alarm system.
Afterward, he recruited the help of his friends, Marek and Bartek, and carried out the crime. Nonetheless, once at the bank, the trio realizes the lottery winnings have been delayed, which sends them into a frenzy. Furthermore, before they could bounce with their diminished loot, the bank employees arrived ahead of schedule. As it turns out, the employees were planning on surprising their colleague, the cashier, with a birthday cake. However, their unexpected arrival only blindsided Kacper and his friends.
At first, the trio only tied up the employees, with every intention to leave without killing them. However, a slight slip-up from Bartek ruined everything. Bartek accidentally said Kacper’s name aloud as they were leaving, identifying him to his co-workers. Kacper knew if he let the employees live, they would end up ratting him out sooner or later. Since he was desperate to win custody of his sister, he couldn’t even skip town to avoid the consequences of his actions. For the same reason, at that moment, Kacper decides the only way he can control this situation is by killing the employees on the spot.
Does Tadeusz Catch Kacper?
Kacper, Marek, and Bartek have strong shared alibis in place to protect them during the police investigation. Their alibis are well sealed, from their attendance at their friend’s military ceremony to even a speeding ticket accumulated on purpose. Nonetheless, in the end, Bartek’s conscience threatens to bring their downfall. Even though Bartek never killed anyone with his own hands, he knows that his slip-up directly led to the murders. As such, the guilt of his actions rests heavy in his mind. Inevitably, the same gets him—and Marek—killed. After their deaths, Kacper finds himself with a new puzzle to solve to ensure he emerges from the situation unscathed.
As such, Kacper decides to confess to Marek’s murder—but only after highly fictionalizing the events that led to his friend’s death. He tries to frame Marek as the mastermind behind the robbery—and Bartek’s death—while distancing himself from the actual crime. As such, he claims that he only killed Marek in self-defense after the man tried to come after him to tie up one last loose end. Naturally, the scheme ticks off Tadeusz, who knows Kacper isn’t as innocent as he is making himself out to be. Consequently, he confronts the other man in a violent interrogation—breaking departmental rules in front of his superiors once again—to gather any useful information.
As a result, after Kacper slips up, Tadeusz learns that his military friend may be more pertinent to the case than previously assumed. The same proves to be true after Tadeusz and Aleksandra pay a visit to the friend and discover that his military-grade gun had gone missing after he partied with Kacper and his friends. The soldier hadn’t said anything to his superiors for fear of repercussions after he had found the gun again in the bushes with a few shots missing. Thus, Tadeusz finds the murder weapon, which can easily be connected to Kacper—solidifying the other man as a fugitive of the state.
As reality catches up to Kacper, he decides to bolt away from his apartment, narrowly avoiding police officers at every turn. Still, even after he goes MIA, Tadeusz knows him well enough to figure out his location. At the end of a losing game, Kacper has returned to the person for whom he started it all: Ewa. The man knows his jig is up and that he can’t keep running anymore. Therefore, he has decided to spend his last moments of freedom with his sister. Eventually, Tadeusz shows up to take him away without any guns blazing.
In the end, as Kacper walks out of the house and to the officers surrounding the premises, he reaches out for something in his pocket that triggers every officer to shoot at him. As he falls to the ground in his death, it’s revealed he was only procuring a piece of the puzzle he and Ewa were solving. Still, it’s likely that the man made the move on purpose, knowing it would get him killed to ensure that he brings a swift end to his life.
Does Tadeusz Get His Job Back? Who Does He Call at the End?
Once the bank robbery case wraps up, Tadeusz may expect himself to return to his former glory and be reinstated into field duty. However, the same never comes to fruition. Even though Tadeusz solved the case—as the Prosecutor had asked him to, he also breached a few dozen departmental rules in the process. From pressuring therapists to share confidential information to emotionally blackmailing one of his perpetrators—Tadeusz’s investigation was full of ethical breaches. As it turns out, Tadeusz is a creature of habit through and through.
Initially, Tadeusz was dismissed and discharged from duty after his association with the Communist government. However, his particular brand of old-school cop brutality also played a significant part in the same. Therefore, after his interactions with Kacper—wherein he assaults the man during interrogation and threatens him with a gun, he proves to his superiors that he still isn’t fit for duty. As a result, the Prosecutor never follows through with her end of the deal and allows a reluctant Aleksandra to become the public face of the investigation.
The experience may not have brought back Tadeusz’s former job. Still, it taught him a few important lessons. After witnessing Kacper’s dedication toward his sister, the retired cop is inspired to apply the same principles to his own personal life. Tadeusz’s family had long cut ties with him due to his unconventional methods and obsessive focus on the job during his police force days. Thus, he never got to know his granddaughter as well as he would have liked. As such, at the story’s end, when Tadeusz is back in the cabin where he started out, he decides to take a leap of faith and reach out to his young granddaughter in hopes of building a relationship with her.
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