First up, no, not that Twilight. There’s no room for ancient vampires chasing virginal teenagers in this Twilight from 1990, directed by György Fehér, shot in a distinctive black and white and using the Hungarian language. Hence the original title, Szürkület.
The story is by Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt and has already been used once before, in 2001’s The Pledge, the existential murder thriller directed by Sean Penn where Jack Nicholson’s detective on the point of retirement makes a promise to a grieving family that he’ll find the killer of their murdered child, a promise that drives him to the brink of madness.
It’s the same here, but Fehér’s treatment couldn’t be more different from Penn’s if he’d tried (which is logically impossible since this came first by 11 years).
This is an exercise in tone and atmosphere. If you’ve seen Mark Jenkin’s Bait – shot in black and white on a wind-up Bolex camera, with all the sound added later – you’ve got to wonder if Jenkin was inspired by Fehér’s Twilight, which has the same MO but goes one step further than Jenkin, using the opportunities offered by post-dubbing to up the atmospheric ante even further.
The mood is macabre from the opening shot – behatted, trenchcoat-wearing detectives arriving in big old cars at the scene of the crime, their voices boomingly intimate – and it stays that way to the end. Sinister, spooky. Everyone speaks slowly with their voices pitched low.
The sound design is fabulous. If water drips, it drips with a resonant echo. If a man walks down a corridor, his footsteps have gravedigger sonority. The use of music ditto (Fehér has used the same chilling Georgian folk music that Herzog used for Nosferatu the Vampyre). The cinematography is remarkable. One review I read says there are fewer than 50 shots in this film. That might or might not be true but there are certainly not a lot – DP Miklós Gurbán’s camera uses exquisite framing to squeeze the maximum amount of information onto the screen and when he has to move his camera he moves it almost balletically.
It’s like watching a film that’s been through the projector more times than is good for it, so the sound and the image have become furry, blurry, indistinct. It’s entirely deliberate and here’s hoping that the new 4K restoration coming later this year doesn’t clean it up too much (Gurbán has supervised it, which is reassuring; Fehér is now dead).
The story is actually fairly standard – a dead child, a suspect who seems likely enough, a detective (Péter Haumann) who isn’t convinced of the man’s guilt, who then goes it alone once he’s been processed into retirement and winds up doing something reckless to lure his suspect into his trap. It’s the treatment that’s unusual. Adding to the elemental vibe, characters are rarely referred to by name – it’s “the girl”, “the inspector”, “woman in overalls”, “psychiatrist”, “father” etc.
Fehér was a collaborator with Hungarian arch-miserabilist Béla Tarr, and Tarr’s influence can be felt, as can Tarkovsky’s, but though this is slow and grim Fehér is committed to old-fashioned thriller-genre storytelling, albeit with a hell of a stylistic twist. Every scene in this film is gripping, and if towards the end the familiarity of the plot starts to count against it, Fehér works to obscure the clean lines with all the atmospherics he can muster.
Fehér died in 2002 aged 63, and leaves behind a body of work drawing heavily on canonical authors – Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Ben Johnson, Molière, Hans Christian Andersen. He also made a Hungarian-language version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, renamed Passion (and co-written with Béla Tarr), which, given the brilliance of Twilight, another thriller, makes it a film to track down if you can. Fehér’s films aren’t exactly easy to find.
Twilight (Szürkület) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon (this link is to Second Run’s new restoration)
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
