Here is a bleak, brutal, dispiriting serial killer drama, based on a real-life case from postwar Hungary: the Martfü murders, in which the film finds a queasy political dimension. In 1957, in the provincial town of Martfü in eastern Hungary, a young woman is found brutally killed. Her boyfriend confesses to the crime, but after he has been in prison for some years, more women are murdered and it appears the real culprit is still at large, and the convicted man may have had his confession beaten out of him, or confessed due to a complex, deep-seated guilt about something other than the crime itself.
Gábor Jászberényi is Réti, the innocent man; Zsolt Anger is Bóta, the anguished cop who got it wrong and Péter Bárnai is Szirmai, the fierce new prosecutor convinced that by re-opening Réti’s case he can catch the real killer. The reasons for the initial miscarriage of justice are tangled up in history: it happened just after the 1956 uprising and its suppression and, as one officer acidly puts it: “After the counter-revolution, the regime had to prove the force of law and order …” The combination of an unreal conviction and a very real tyranny creates a dreary malaise. When the prosecutor offers a psychological profile of the murderer, surmising that he feels himself to be “sexually inferior”, the chief investigator remarks gloomily: “That’s true of most people.” It can be crass, but there is merit in this movie’s sense of time and place.
