KATALIN VARGA lives in the rural wilderness of the Carpathian Mountains in a Hungarian speaking region of Romania with her husband Zsigmond and son Orbán, but she has been hiding a troubling secret - Orbán is not Zsigmond’s son.
When he discovers this, an angry and heartbroken Zsigmond banishes Katalin (Hilda Péter ) from the village in which they live. Rejected by the man she loves and the place she calls home, Katalin takes Orbán with her, on the pretext of going to stay with her mother.
However Katalin is really embarking on a journey to face and get revenge for the most harrowing secret she still lives with day to day - Orbán was not the offspring of a love affair, but the result of a brutal rape. Two men were involved. Antal (played by Tibor Pálffy ) carried out the act, the other, named Gergely, watched.
After a long journey through many wildernesses and villages, she discovers Gergely and kills him, but confronting Antal is a different matter. He is now a kind and hardworking farmer, devoted to his beautiful wife Etelka, and he takes Orbán to his heart the moment he meets him - not realising he is his biological father. Yet this is still the man who viscously raped her many years before.
Katalin Varga, written and directed by Briton Peter Strickland, with dialogue in Hungarian, is a powerful, sometimes poetic, and often unsettling drama, which fuses elements of thriller, horror, and realism, to tackle the horrific crime of rape.
The film switches between shots of rural Romania bathed in sunshine, blue skies, and greenery, to depictions of villages and farmhouses where everything is dank, dark, and rundown. The soundtrack is also a key element to the film’s drama. Mostly it is just an abstract, ambient, hum, often occurring at still shots of a forest, a pan past mountains, or when Katalin and Orbán are travelling on the road.
Yet this contrast between ordinary sights and strange sounds rachets up the tension and gives a highly sinister, horror like feel, to the proceedings. Even the sound of cowbells and the wind in another sequence takes on a disturbing air.
The most arresting and unsettling moment (in a film of brilliant sequences ) is when Katalin, Antal, and Etelka are on a boat, rowing gently down a river which flows through beautiful countryside, where she relates the rape she suffered at Antal’s hands. She never mentions he is the culprit, but the calm, dignified way she tells her story makes its details all the more upsetting.
This is a powerful drama that is also thought provoking and gripping, with many images that linger in the mind long after the film ends.
Katalin Varga is out on DVD now. It will also be screened by the Galway Film Society and Amnesty International on Wednesday March 10 at 8pm in the O’Flaherty Theatre, NUI Galway, to mark International Women’s Day. For tickets contact the Amnesty International Shop, 2/3 Middle Street, on 091 - 533637.
