A small town in Hungary, August 1945. The war is finally over, and life is getting back to normal. This day is a happy one: The son of the powerful town clerk (Péter Rudolf) is getting married, and the whole town is invited. But at the train station several miles away, two men (Marcell Nagy and Iván Angelusz) have arrived. An ominous warning precedes them into town: Jews are here. They’ve come back. Writer-director Ferenc Török is torturously slow to reveal why the apparently contented town is in an uproar, but we immediately have very dark suspicions. And, indeed, what’s to come is the town’s reckoning, at last, with its collusion in the wartime roundup of their Jewish neighbors. We don’t tell ourselves stories that whisper, The Nazis had help. So this quiet horror movie—about grief and regret as a kind of spiritual possession, about rationalization and denial as outright immorality—is unexpected, startling and still relevant. The human inclination to collude with evil and tell ourselves we’re just being practical is not one that died with that war.
By
MaryAnn Johanson