“Colors of Evil: Red” is a well-acted, sinister and solidly built Polish serial killer thriller based on a novel by Malgorzata Oliwia Sobczak.

We follow an intrepid and “new” prosecutor/investigator (Jakub Gieszal) and the judge (Maja Ostaszewskya) whose daughter might be a serial killer’s latest victim as one picks apart clues pointing to a rigged system and the mother fears she knows exactly how she and her lawyer-husband (Andrzej Zielinski) “failed our daughter.”

But one of the ways this glib, twisty thriller missteps — apart from a narrow focus that doesn’t see widespread corruption as cultural rot from the country’s tortured, 20th century history, and the jarring, jaunty rock tunes that underscore police raids and the like — is in how it stubbornly it clings to victim-blaming.

Yes, college-age Monika (Zofia Jastrzebska) is beautiful, promiscuous and hellbent on getting what she wants. When insulting the bartenders and the manager (Wojciech Zielinski) of Gdynia’s Shipyard Bar doesn’t land her a job, she sleeps with the guy and becomes an insider there, and that manager’s girlfriend.

That doesn’t mean she deserves to be murdered, her lips sliced off and her body dumped in the Baltic Sea.

That’s where the cops gather and the new guy, Bilski (Gierszal) find her. The coroner (Andrzej Konopka) notes the similarity to an earlier case, the blustery department chief (Zbigniew Stryj) says the guy convicted of that gruesome killing just got out of prison (!?), and there it is.

“Case closed!”

Only the shellshocked, newly-arrested and re-accused “killer” mutters about being “framed again,” before jumping out a police station window. Some of the cops seem a little too eager to move on. And there are all these connections between the judge, her husband, that club and the Cypriot mobster Kazar (Przemyslaw Bluszcz) who owns it and “runs things” in an underworld sense on this corner of the Baltic coast.

As Bilski noses around, with threats of “transfer” hanging over his head, as the judge starts to ask questions, some of which she knows the answer to and which endanger her life, we start to wonder who else in this small world justice system might be implicated.

Flashbacks do a half-decent job of explaining how Monika got in over her head with seemingly no means of escape, lessening the character’s “shaming” and blame.

But director Adrian Panek is unsparing in his focus on the lurid and the stomach-turning. The sex is explicit, the nudity plentiful and the blood flows in more than one scene that our Onassis-glasses mob chief covers with tasteless, sexist jokes.

“Colors of Evil: Red” may be a page-turner, keeping us engaged as tiny bits of foreshadowing reveal new suspects much later on. But it’s never more than a mixed-bag as entertainment, playing up its torture porn elements and wallowing in the sordid and the violent even as it takes a shot at humanizing the victim we first see, time and again, as having effed around and then found out.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic, bloody violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Jakub Gierszal, Maja Ostaszewska, Zofia Jastrzebska, Wojciech Zielinski, Zbigniew Stryj, Andrzej Zielinski, Jan Wieteska, and Przemyslaw Bluszcz

Credits: Directed by Adrian Panek, scripted by Lukasz M. Maciejewski and Adrian Panek, based on a novel by Malgorzata Oliwia Sobczak.

Running time: 1:51