With Béla Tarr acting as script consultant, this treatise on incest and ignorance owes more to his studies of spiritual malaise than Kornél Mundruczó’s musical, Johanna. Even so, the tragic climax feels operatic after the restraint of the preceding action.
Returning to his Danube home, taciturn Félix Lajkó so disapproves of mum Lili Monori’s remarriage that he moves to his late father’s island. But it’s Lajkó’s relationship with feisty sister Orsi Tóth that arouses the curiosity of the misanthropic locals. Shimmeringly shot and directed with an affinity for the simplicity of Lajkó’s construction, this meditation on personal freedom is insinuatingly transgressive.