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The setting of
Kontroll is the Budapest subway system, one of the largest and oldest in the world, and a place that becomes an omniscient character in an ambitious film that jumbles dark comedy, slick action, and horror-movie conventions. The other main character is Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi), part of a team of disheveled ticket inspectors--controllers--who roam the grimy, fluorescent-lit city-under-the-city in a soul-destroying ritual. The job has become such a part of Bulcsú that he never leaves the underground. He has taken to sleeping on empty platforms and getting progressively more unkempt as he accumulates more bruises, bloody noses, and bitterness from his scraps with a variety of unseemly creatures of the night (and day). Among the post-punk, post-communist habitués of this subterranean metropolis are a cute girl in a teddy-bear suit, a rival gang of ticket inspectors who like to play a deadly game of chicken with express trains, and a hooded specter who may or may not be pushing people under subway wheels at crowded stops. First-time director Nimród Antal keenly juggles black comedy, character types, and genre styles, making the most of the weird angles and inherent dark creepiness of his chosen backdrop.
Kontroll keeps pace as a hip, flashy, fast-moving set piece by any international measure.
--Ted Fry
Review
Nimrd Antal's Kontroll is set in the subterranean nightmare world of Budapest's subway system, where hapless petty bureaucrats (Kontroll's "heroes") harass the public to earn their meager, thankless living. Aside from its unique underworld milieu (the film was shot on location, as a deadpan intro disclaims), there's nothing especially original about Antal's film, but the filmmaker's surfeited movie love shines through in its playful allusions to other films, and in its skillful mix of grunge and slickness. Beyond that, the film offers a potently downbeat metaphor for a decent, honorable man's struggles against the essentially soulless nature of bureaucracy. Sndor Csnyi, as Bulcs, makes an agreeable antihero. Csnyi is darkly handsome, but his performance captures an underlying edge of feckless hostility (visually abetted by the physical wounds he incurs over the course of the film) that makes him simultaneously sympathetic and untrustworthy. Gleefully, guiltlessly borrowing a good deal of its sardonic wit and its propulsive visual style, Kontroll is the type of movie that film geeks love to "discover." The Los Angeles-born Antal shows promise with this dexterous debut. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
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