REVIEW: ‘Johnny’ Makes Death And Dying Simple

Polish-language Netflix Original Johnny, directed by Daniel Jaroszek and written by Maciej Kraszewski is a feel-good movie about my least favorite subject: death and dying. I’m a well-documented thanatophobe, so you’d think Johnny, a movie about a man, Patryk (Piotr Trojan) who gets busted for robbery and is given one last chance at parole working in Father Jan’s (Dawid Ogrodnik) hospice, would be a tough one for me. But this isn’t a movie about death and dying itself. It’s about people who make caring for the dying their sacred and personal business, especially when nobody else will.

The movie has a bit of a disjointed feel, with time passing at indiscernible rates and a narration from Patryk trying too hard to direct your attention in one direction or another. But when you separate yourself from the story as a whole and just appreciate it for the series of vignettes its two main characters endure, by the time everything culminates, you’ll have been through a rather moving saga. It’s a tale as old as time: a good person gets caught up doing bad things, so when an even better person intervenes in his life, he is able to uncover his truest self and share that with the world. I don’t care how cliche it is, it’s a perfect formula and Johnny executes it exactly.

You’re never left wondering whether Patryk deserves redemption, or if Jan is really as saintly as he appears. There is neither room for questioning in the script nor time to ponder it because the sequences come one after the next with no pause. I appreciate that there’s no room for air because it lets the movie simply be about Patryk learning to love himself by learning to love some of the hardest people to love, people who won’t be there very long to keep returning it. Every vignette teaches Patryk a new lesson about what it’s like to work with people in hospice care all the while softening his disposition and molding him into the kind of character that you just can’t help but cheer for. It’s not a very dramatic arc Patryk takes, but really that’s fine, because the whole movie is just so wholesome that anything more dramatic than we get might have ruined it for feeling like melodrama.

This is all possible because of Ogrodnik’s steady role as Jan. Jan’s dying himself with terminal brain cancer, and no matter how far his illness progresses and how much physicality acting this out requires, Ogrodnik is always able to maintain his position as the voice of reason, comfort, and hope in every scene. While the cinematography is nothing special, the final moment Ogrodnik plays on-screen alone instantly launched the movie up a whole point in my mind for how well it frames this man, based on a real priest as revealed by the end, as exactly the kind of person you wish there were more of in the world and know there could be if we just tried to be a bit more like him ourselves.

Johnny is a simple but impactful movie. It doesn’t try too hard to add drama or intrigue to its tale, just allowing the goodness of two people to speak for themselves as they endure hardship and work through one of life’s most harrowing responsibilities: caring for the dying.

Johnny is streaming now on Netflix.