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Mike McCahill finds himself thoroughly absorbed by this strikingly atmospheric Transylvanian drama, which is the debut film of British director Peter Strickland.

There are times when the narrative of a film matches the circumstances of its production. Although Katalin Varga was shot around the Romanian-Hungarian border and is performed in local dialects, its director is entirely English: Reading’s very own Peter Strickland. Yet just as his eponymous heroine is at one with the natural world into which she’s cast out following revelations of alleged infidelity, so too Strickland seems to be as one with Katalin herself: this is a film about exile made by a filmmaker in exile - no wonder it resonates so.

It’s clear that displacement has forced Strickland to cast off any extraneous fripperies and return to the very basics of storytelling: to travel light, as it were. The film is nominally set during the present, yet as Katalin sets off via horse and cart with her son to her own mother’s home in the forest, what’s instantly striking is how oddly timeless Strickland’s film is, the Romanian countryside being almost entirely absent of the signs and signifiers we’ve come to associate with the modern world.

Instead of zeitgeisty flash, we’re offered lasting, lingering atmosphere: eerie stillnesses and the unknowable mysteries of the Eastern European landscape - who knows how many secrets have been buried there over the centuries? For all Mark Gyori’s gorgeous, sundappled cinematography, Katalin Varga is premised on an unnerving core of horror: the journey to the grandmother’s house recalls Red Riding Hood, while there are elements of rape-revenge thrillers in the mix, and at 80 minutes, the film retains the taut breathlessness of the very best B pictures.

That it stands as all these things and more is down to the complexity of the central character, a seemingly nurturing woman-of-the-fields who reveals herself as a terrible - indeed, deadly - flirt whenever she lets her hair down. Katalin Varga remains unpredictable because the expression on lead actress Hilda Péter’s face keeps shifting like clouds over a Transylvanian valley; the result is one of the most distinctive and downright unexpected features made by a British filmmaker anywhere in the world this year.

 

Mike McCahill on 27th January 2010
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