Cult: Hungary’s Oscar-named film bleeds more wounds than the dead, it’s about that
The ghosts are coming and they are very evil! Woe to us, for here are the very evil ghosts!
The biggest problem is Post Mortem with these two sentences, it is possible to describe essentially the whole story with all its questions, answers, adjectives and its underlying content, or if it still seems small, it may be possible to say, they are scary too! ”
And the basic idea is very good. The exam Popular for the movie, Stop Mother Teresa! known because Peter Bergendy does what the Comrade Draculics the vampire movie, the Space picnic and with the sci-fi genre: he does not simply make a horror film as a Hungarian director, but makes a real Hungarian horror film, placing the plot in a small village in Hungary after the First World War. Which, in addition to creating a unique world, is also a good decision, because the argument against Hungarian genre film is quite understandable, which is why you can simply try to copy what incomparably less money, less expertise, less experience, less opportunity to copy, which Hollywood studios also produce weekly. .
Well, in the thatched-roofed adobe houses of the Hungarian countryside, a horror film has not yet been made about ghosts that scare women in headscarves and bakfis playing with corn-cob dolls. So far!
Such a wife, on the other hand, is just an uncomfortable realization that Bergendy ends up doing nothing with her own idea, and in the background, the venue adds nothing but film and venue to the film, a little too sterile to inevitably arise in the viewer: if for some reason Once upon a time, the Szentendre Open-Air Museum disappeared from the face of the earth, and suddenly no costumed Hungarian film could be made, because as the actors walk in this alleged village, the steaming pumpkin splendor and the families lined up with bored faces rather with small children sniffing for chocolate. it’s also disturbing that while the creaking of the winter and how hard the ground is is crucial to the film’s history, it requires the crew not even trying to remove the permanent traces of snowmelt from the picture, even though it would think from a budget of 866 million. people to run into more unusual solutions or digital post-production as well.
The open-air museum is just a scenery, but what’s more wrong is that the scare is not just that, it’s the essence of the film. Yet we are long past the age when it was enough to riot the frightening audience with ghosts popping out of a dark corner and bone music sounding at the right moment; horror is good if the horrors go beyond themselves, if it can express, symbolize something, if supernatural or otherwise brutal events actually translate depression, grief, motherhood problems, racism or anything else into the language of horror (just a few examples) from recent years).
And since the Post Mortem takes place after the First World War, in a village, almost all the men were taken away and only a few returned, they were taken away by the Spanish flu, it is easy enough to give up the possibility of being buried due to the icy land, always returning dead from mourning, loss the creators should talk about intolerance. According to the plot, the protagonist, Tomas himself, escapes death in the army in an explosion and works as a still photographer after the war, meaning he takes the final picture of the beautifully dressed dead last in their family. (Again, this is just a great idea: leave it tingling indecisively, whether it’s actually a touching or a sick thing.) But what’s only certain at first is that it then becomes certain: ghosts appear in the photos as well – and that’s just the beginning of the trouble.
It is essentially the end, if not the plot, but in terms of the underlying content. Bergendy and his screenwriters Gábor Hellebrandt and Piros Zánkay do not know or do not want to deepen the story
ghosts come, evil, still come, more and more evil, woe.
There is no sin and no punishment, no mysterious secret and no dissolution, no symbol and no metaphor, just a stenciled, stone-simple ending that says: in vain was the thicket and the clean room, the world war and the there-onion-in-crab mood, after all, this movie doesn’t want to be more than the cheaper and awkward little brother of a dozen horrors made in Hollywood. A good example of the lack of underlying content is that it is repeated many times in the film, the protagonist, Tomas Swabian, once someone even yells at him “no, no, never” and then he doesn’t start anything in the film with all this, there will be no responsibility , meaning, purpose, a half – second representation of origin or social tensions. Moreover, we do not even get answers to the questions that the film itself raises; not only symbolic, but nothing, the most basic points of the plot remain unexplained.
But even with that, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem to rank the film among the dozens of films with a resigning sigh if you confidently hit their standard. But not hitting, listing is also long, how much for all reasons. Parts meant to be tense are often rhythmic, dragged, repetitive, or any combination of these: there are times when the protagonist walks toe in the house for minutes, where sometimes a scream or a homeless pounding of shoes is heard from a distance, or you don’t feel like you’re at stake for anything. For example, when the ghosts take the ladder in front of the attic driveway, the man jumps down to the ground floor through the gap without much trouble, doesn’t even have to dust himself after it, and then walks away and is done.
The visual realization of ghosts is technically weak, and in idea long worn out, as if CGI ghost samples had been downloaded from some free site. The actors ’reactions to the danger are ridiculously, silently exaggerated: so many frowns, widened eyes, and a rounded mouth rule are more frightening than ghosts,
the only trouble is that we are not afraid of reactions, but not to cut into Benny Hill’s music.
Equally unpleasant is the jerking of obsessed people, which always looks exactly as if actors are jerking their body parts reluctantly, not as if supernatural forces are doing it. The masks or makeups of dead, burnt, tortured people don’t suggest a professional staff of hundreds of millions, but – and this is a bigger problem – even more inexperienced but at least very enthusiastic little masters, rather Halloween rubber masks from the polar dilibolt. The movie trailer alone also shows very well floating bodies work well, but that’s not enough to save what can be saved – more precisely, there’s little that can be saved.
Bergendy puts his actors in a difficult position in several ways: many times he feels conversations like paper, which would be hard for anyone to say well, and then, just like the film, the characters don’t have depths. Starring Viktor Klem, he tells every sentence in vain, realistically, with appropriate facial expressions and accents, once a three-dimensional figure with motivations, past, future and rich spirituality emerges: it turns out that a little girl appeared before him as a near-death experience. , to whom he therefore clings from henceforth to his closeness, and even tries to cast out the spirits for his sake, though it is already obscured,
otherwise, why is the one-person Hungarian Ghostbusters becoming a poor photographer.
The other actors can’t really form a consistent character either; Judit Schell, for example, is memorable in some of her scenes, but why she behaves the way she doesn’t turn out, even if it’s not the actress ’fault.
And since we live in Hungary for many years in the NER, all this is further complicated by the fact that Post Mortem Hungary’s nomination for the Oscar, despite the fact that everyone who has a say in the decision, knows for sure that there is no chance of winning prizes at smaller festivals, not just the award, but not even the nomination, and probably even if at least the it could bring the quality of decent scary horror films put together with great professional knowledge. The producer, on the other hand, is Tamás Lajos, who was one of the first to undertake and receive a high commission as a party soldier implementing the state einstand of the University of Theater and Film Arts,
THE Post Mortem with his nomination, we finally got to the point where top party politics like tar eventually seeped down to the lowest levels as well, no longer helping the pardoned – as he can’t get the unworthy film close to the Oscars anyway – only hurting the independents proclaimed opposition. Everything is reprimanded and sticks to everyone, even those who – like Péter Bergendy and the crew – certainly didn’t ask for it. They just wanted to shoot a decent horror, and the biggest trouble could have been that they failed.
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