Katalin Varga

Obviously filmmaker Strickland has a special interest in women's world. Hilda Péter is simply brilliant as the strong willed woman, giving it a mythical inner power and carries the whole show. Shot in 17 days, the movie has the stamp of a genius inspiration. I think it would easily be considered masterpiece in case it was part of a grander philosophical undertaking.

't easy to follow, since a lot of the plot and background story is told little by little.

But the visuals is enough to watch this film. The cinematography and composition is something I haven't seen in a while. I gather the film was shot on 16mm, but that doesn't bother at all. On the contrary, it gives a small personality to the film.

The only weaknesses which I found were in the script. It's somehow difficult to follow, although understandable. But, because it was difficult to follow, it was difficult to get emotionally attached.

But as an art house film, it is a must see. Maybe not for the big public, but for the film buff.

I enjoyed Peter Strickland's 'Berberian Sound Studio' from 2012, and this film made by him 3 years earlier is just as good, if not better. It has a strange tone - almost like a 1970s Agnes Varda film, but it's set in Romania in present day. It's extremely erie in places and very beautifully shot in the Carpathian mountains about a woman with nothing left to lose out for vengeance. It also features a superb (but disturbing) monologue midway through the film from lead actress Hilda Peter.

Great, atmospheric effort from Strickland. I can only imagine he had some affinity with this part of Romania whether from childhood or other. The soundtrack and some of the slow lingering shots (esp. the scene looking at child, mother and horse not moving from behind, and the forest shot) were very affecting, and reminded me of Tarkovsky (not in a bad way ;)I got to thinking of the inextricable nature of all things, of how everything (as a single glorious 'entity') was so deviously and religiously bound up that to even attempt to extract something from it was tantamount to destructuring the whole (and thus destroying its royalty). That a film can inspire me (it has to be said not single-handedly)to such ends is indicative of a deep metaphysical quality within it.There is a particular sentence that the man utters towards the end of the film that resonates deeply towards this metaphysis. I shan't explicate it, nor even repeat it, but you shall know it when you hear it.

Thanks for this Strickland, and all who were involved in and outside it (even the guy who carted the extra film stock when, presumably, you ran out ;) 'Ultimately, there are no parts at all.' Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life.

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.