The Polish crime thriller The Hater, which just hit Netflix, is simultaneously cartoonish and way too real. It follows disgraced ex-law student Tomasz, a hollow-eyed creep who looks like a cross between Michael Cera and a Bond villain, as he attempts to win over a childhood crush by becoming a shady digital consultant tasked with destroying the progressive political candidate her family supports. He excels at deception and misdirection. After creating chaos in the Polish fitness influencer community by manufacturing a scandal involving turmeric, Tomasz slides into a digital underworld full of Islamophobic white supremacists. He becomes their phantom puppet master by way of fake social media posts and coded conversations inside of a videogame with a prospectless young white man who lives unhappily with his grandmother and is obsessed with—yes, you guessed it—guns. In summary, it reads like an extra-aware after-school special.
The movie’s history is a bit of a spoiler: Its release had to be delayed because the plot cuts uncomfortably close to a real life tragedy. At a Christmas charity event last year, Gdansk’s liberal mayor Pawel Adamowicz was assassinated onstage. In The Hater, Tomasz’s manipulations also culminate in a bloody assassination of a fictional left-leaning Polish politician named Pawel.
The film’s director, Jan Komasa, has told stories about online lives lived darkly before. While Netflix makes no mention of it whatsoever, The Hater is actually a sequel to Komasa’s 2011 movie, The Suicide Room, which is about a teenager whose life becomes a ca