3 out of 5

Directed by: Marek Lechki and Monika Filipowicz

There are some usual problems with this Coben-verse series – excess characters and “what was the point of that?” red herrings; a mystery box structure that exists for the sake of being a mystery box – and then there are some issues that just feel like relics of TV from a decade back, with unnecessary female objectification and sexed up moments that really add nothing except flesh; a bit more lingering on the violence against women than against men – but (really leaning into that emphasis) most of that thankfully sits outside of a pretty competent drama / thriller, with a strong central performance from Maria Dębska, some surprisingly quality cop procedural bits, and a consistently sober, moody tone that works well with the material.

Just One Look, like 99.99% of Coben shows, deals with a buried family secret. This time, Greta (Dębska) finds what looks like an old photo of her husband, Jacek (Cezary Łukaszewicz) she’d not seen before, and which contains an unfamiliar girl who’s faced has been X’d out. Upon showing the photo to Jacek, he’s clearly unsettled by it, and does the ol’ “I’m going out for milk” routine… and doesn’t return. Greta files a missing persons report with a seemingly uninterested detective (Miroslaw Kropielnicki); meanwhile, we know Jacek has been abducted by a hitman (Mirosław Haniszewski), but for reasons unknown. Discovering those reasons has Greta exploring her partially missing memories of a devastating concert fire she lived through, interacting with a disgraced prosecutor (Miroslaw Zbrojewicz) who’s interested in the other girl in the photo, and fending off the interests of a local mobster (Andrzej Zielinski), who’s also tied to that concert.

About half of those interactions are nonsense that ultimately doesn’t matter, which – see above – is not so unusual for one of these series.

However, writers Agata Malesińska and Maciej Kowalewski, adapting Coben’s source book, and directors Marek Lechki and Monika Filipowicz do a competent job of keeping the plates spinning in a way that clues us in to how these characters / pieces relate without necessarily overselling them. Greta essentially ignores them, allowing the viewer to do so as well. And that works because we’re mostly able to trust Greta’s instincts: while there are inevitable flaws in logic all over this thing, working within the parameters of a character with very selective, convenient amnesia, Dębska gives Greta a consistent throughline of just needing to get to the next step – just locate her husband. She doesn’t need to solve everything else, and so each decision she makes has more practicality to it than we’re used to from Coben characters.

Over in cop land, the detective turns out to be one of those casually observant types, and does some actual pound-the-paperwork detectiving to fill in the gaps that Greta is stumbling across, giving us both sides of the mystery via watchable characters.

With those positives expounded, there’s a pretty big negative: the story is very shallow, or at least the way we are told it. The essential mystery regards the Why of Jacek’s kidnapping, and how this ties to the fire from years ago, but in order to defeat the kind of diminishing returns of constant twists that Coben shows pull out, the structure of Just One Look pushes most of the explanations into the series’ post-script, or even off the page / screen completely. This is why those positives work – we’re invested in Greta’s plight – but it’s also what makes that mystery very, very mundane. Like to the extent that I almost wasn’t sure there was much of a mystery; the reveals are treated without the usual pageantry. Going to Reddit to see if I was missing something, I was amused to find debates of “So X did Y?” questions – read in the tone of, “that’s it?” – and people reading deeply into a single sentence or look for some kind of extra twist that I don’t think exists.

Overall, this I lean towards this alternate structure being more of a good thing, as it kept me invested, and not hate-watching the back half just to see the solve.

As a final note, I guess I’d add some specific experiences as an English-speaking viewer using subtitles: I’ve watched Polish series before and not had the following issue, but something about the names of the characters and how they were bandied about made some of the side characters hard to keep track of. That’s probably just an ignorant-me thing, but it is a hop and a skip from a second criticism: I think the subs were off. I think subjects were maybe mixed up sometimes, or some culturally contextual things not effectively translated. A few snippets I rewatched to make sure I caught the sub correctly, and it would just be… slightly wrong. You’d get the gist, but it can definitely take you out of a moment. Character names maybe shouldn’t be related to that, but I guess I wonder if subs that managed context better would’ve slipped in some extra verbal cues here or there that would’ve made it easier for me to tie names to faces. I dunno.