Katalin Varga

2009 film from Romania, but directed by the Brit Peter Strickland. Seen as one of the better tiny budget films of the past few years.
This is undoubtedly a gothic piece of work. It deliberately crackles onto us, both formally and in its content? How does it do this? The settings of the shadows striking, the cobwebby forests. The plot is in a way very stylised, our lead even referencing the idea of a witch.
Perhaps this film may have worked slightly better had it in fact gone the whole gothic hog; it does not though do so. We have some touching and interesting scenes of the lead's relationship with her son, along with interesting riffs on feminism, masculinty, other things. If the film had been pure and sharp like this (not any shorter; it's a little too short as it is) then perhaps it would have held the attention slightly better. Then again, it would have lost these interesting realist elements. Would it would have prevented, which is a problem, is how some scenes do individually drag. As a whole, the film paces itself very well, but some scenes, rather than shots, simply are too long, while others are too short. The film as a whole is actually a little short, more lead up may have added more weight, make it less gothic and spikey, though it would then have lost its fable quality.
Let us look at some of the interesting formal elements in this film. We love how the British director had the imagination to do this, really respect that he tried to do something. Perhaps we would have liked even more of this. The deliberate colour contrasts, of the sharp brights at the start moving to the greys as she must leave the idyll, is well done. It is one of a number of deliberately jarring effects, we're especially thinking about the cuts which is clearly meant to jolt, to 'snap' us, part of the gothic atmosphere. The difference between hand-held P.O.V. work, and the wide, brooding mountain scenes with smoke, is accentuated by the scene, the only connection scene, where one cascades into another. Sometimes, Stickland falls into a trap of chucking in some 'beautiful images' around a plot, so we especially appreciated when the two come together in this key shot.
The sounstrack is deliberately ratcheting up the diagetic sound, with cracks and clicks and various noises. This is partly just an effect, but on occassion works, if at other times its concatation with music can be melodramatic.
What about the themes? This is a film with an interesting feminist slant, which sits, perhaps a little uneasily, between its universal quality as a fable and its very much immanenet depiction of modern day Romania, the povery and the life there.
We didn't love this film, we appreciated the intelligent attempts formalism, but felt it couldn't quite find its way onto either of the two stools it sits between.