The New Existential Thriller from Hungary

This Saturday, I saw this new "existential thriller" from Hungary called Kontroll, which was the most popular film in Hungary in the last year and which had won sundry awards here and there including a selection in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival.

The indication that the film is not a regular thriller but an existential or a metaphysical one comes even before the start of the film itself, when a character, who identifies himself as chief of Budapest Subway System, reads a printed disclaimer in a thoroughly deadpan voice, which is actually quite hilarious. He says, rather predictably, that the film is fictional and doesn't reflect the realities of the subway system and then adds that everything is "obviously symbolic" and the young director was permitted to make the film only because he wanted to make a film about "good and evil" and not about the subway system.

In the next two hours Kontroll never leaves the dark and dank netherworld of the subway system, with its fluorescent lightings, sounds of trains whooshing past one another and all kinds of eccentric and grotesque characters embarking and disembarking from the trains. The eccentricities, in a way, and together with highly stylized lighting and dynamic steadicam camera work enforce the surrealistic credentials of the film. These eccentrics include not only the commuters, who form a rag-tag bunch of hostile punks and abusive tarts with their pimps, but also the Kontrollers , or the ticket checkers. One of those eccentric ticket checkers is our hero, who is rather good looking but who, it seems, hasn't slept in weeks. As it turns out he has been sleeping, if at all he does, on the platforms and prowling the labyrinthine tunnels in the night all alone, or perhaps not. There is a mysterious hooded figure, who keeps cropping up, almost supernaturally, to push innocent bystanders on the tracks, into the way of oncoming trains. The hooded figure is perhaps the hero's double, his evil side, although it is never made very clear in the film. Finally our hero meets his angel who wears a bear costume all the time but in the final scene in an obviously symbolic scene comes dressed with wings and takes the hero out of subway to light after he is done with the evil one. This good triumphs over evil. It was overall a nice fairy tale.

The "message" of the film (lonely-hero-finds-salvation-in-a-beautiful-angel-and-escapes-netherworld) is, of course, very trite and I am not sure even the director wants us to take it seriously. On the other hand, what interests the first time director Nimrod Antal is the creation of atmosphere and mood, which he does perfectly. Equally attention-grabbing is the heart-pounding techno-rock sound score by some music outfit called Neo (inspired by Matrix?). The music reminded me of Run Lola Run which belongs to the same MTV, hipster school of film making as this one does.

Roger Ebert talks about the film here and Jim Hoberman here.