Reading-born Peter Strickland says he was so invisible to the film establishment that he had to go to Romania to make his first feature. Now he lives in Hungary. He scraped together enough money for this impressive debut from several European sources.
A striking Romanian actress, Hilda Péter, plays Katalin, a young woman banished by her husband and her village when it is discovered that her son, Orbán (Norbert Tankó), was fathered by another man. Taking the boy with her, she travels through the Carpathians on a horse and cart to find the father.
It is a dangerous journey. Those she meets seem threatening if not overtly hostile. Eventually she stops at a village she vowed she would never set foot in again. We guess something terrible happened to her there a decade ago but she is befriended by a local (the excellent Romanian actor Tibor Pálffy) who may or may not be somehow implicated.
Apart from looking extraordinary, thanks to the naturally brooding beauty of the locations and Mark Gyori’s eloquent cinematography, the film has an original soundtrack from Steven Stapleton and Geoff Cox which adds a great deal to the atmosphere Strickland generates.
Above all, Péter is superb, pointing up without over-dramatising Katalin’s struggle to exorcise tragedy. The whole is like a folk tale crossed with a thriller and road movie. Without a doubt it is one of the best new British films of the year, if you can justly call it fully British. And it shows that there are some homegrown directors who will never take no for an answer.
Katalin Varga
Cert: 15
