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Fresh and Exciting

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Having already seen and very much enjoyed this director's Berberian Sound Studio and prior to seeing his latest, The Duke Of Burgundy, decided to check out this, his first feature. Glad I did, seems it didn't get a theatrical release in UK, which is a travesty. Great little film, very focused, very intense, with a stunning central performance from Hilda Peter. Problems in her village prompt her to take off with her son and traverse the Carpathians and maybe exorcise her devils. Always very good to look at, this also has what has become a Strickland trademark, amazing score. The tinkling cowbells, echoing across the fields or the creak of the horse and cart carrying them both find their way unobtrusively into the score. Always engrossing, the central sequence where the main character explains graphically what happened to her as their boat slowly spins on a lake is spellbinding and so very effective. Excellent.

As others have commented this is a directorial debut and for that alone it deserves high marks. The director shot the film over a 17-day period, which fits with the spare and lean story of a young woman (Katalin Varga) who takes a journey that we learn, as we travel with her, is one of revenge.I thought the story line was very good because it allowed lots of moments that were eerie and verging on horrific as Katalin's memories of her rape surface. For example as she looks into the forest where her son is running, the forest becomes a dark place in which evils hide. The sound and music used in the film are evocative and a big contributor to the atmosphere of prevalent menace.What was most satisfying was the way in which Katalin's revenge plan unravels as her experiences give way to lots of different feelings particularly around her son, who is travelling with her and is the result of the rape. The conversation that Katalin has with Antal, her attacker and her son's father, felt so real filled as it was with brittle feelings of disappointment. This film manages to cleverly underline that what we think and imagine we might do and what we are capable of enacting are two different things. Especially as the monster rapist in Katalin's mind and memories is found to be an ordinary man who is kind and hospitable to strangers in need.There is a surprise ending where the theme of revenge is played out unexpectedly and before that an unforeseen tragedy that visits Antal. Both of which feed the religious theme that is also present throughout; particularly around evil and mercy.The director's next project is a horror that I look forward to for his use of horror elements in Katalin Varga work well with other elements such as folk telling and a thriller about revenge.

The beautiful Transylvanian countryside, where a thin veil of modernity covers a continuing peasant lifestyle for many, is the setting for Peter Strickland's short, unsentimental film 'Katalin Varga' about the aftermath of a rape. It's a quiet movie, strikingly shot, that offers no pretence of life easier than it actually is. To me, it seemed that the reaction of the perpetrator's wife seemed simultaneously slightly overdone (in terms of motivation) and underplayed; one might also suggest that the ending is not especially satisfying, probably because the film never lets us know exactly what it is that Katalin is hoping for. This can be justified, however, because it's completely plausible that the character doesn't know herself. In a nutshell, this is a revenge movie; but so much more interesting that most of what we see in this genre.

Peter Strickland's debut movie Katalin Varga reminds me very much of another recent British film, Asif Kapadia's 2007 effort Far North, which is also a folk horror story about an outcast and her child. Stickland uses the dank forest of Romania instead of the perilous ice flows of the north, but the movies are birds of a feather, low budget movies intended to tap primal energies.Children run away from Katalin Varga, a darkly pretty woman with live-wire eyes, who's altogether too spirited to remain unmolested in the time-capsuled world with which the movie presents te viewer. Folk have mobile phones, but Katalin still travels by horse-drawn cart, and men still make hay in the fields with pitchforks. Gossip in Katalin's village is poisonous enough to make Clouzot's vision in Le Corbeau appear positively made of marshmallow. Following the repurcussions of gossip regarding Katalin's past, she travels with her child into an apparently infrastructure-less hinterland on a dark mission, like black lightning.It's no surprise to find, following shot after shot of foreboding nature scenes, that this is a tragedy, in a cul-de-sac structure similar to Monte Hellman's brilliant 1965 movie Ride in the Whirlwind.It's a brutal movie, in structure rather than in screen violence, which there is remarkably little of, and which is generally obscured in incoherence when it occurs. It's almost senseless and left me with a directionless primitive anger.