Reptileenbu Did you people see the same film I saw?

Nessieldwi Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Blake Rivera If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Smallclone100 I enjoyed Peter Strickland's 'Berberian Sound Studio' from 2012, and this film made by him 3 years earlier is just as good, if not better. It has a strange tone - almost like a 1970s Agnes Varda film, but it's set in Romania in present day. It's extremely erie in places and very beautifully shot in the Carpathian mountains about a woman with nothing left to lose out for vengeance. It also features a superb (but disturbing) monologue midway through the film from lead actress Hilda Peter.

bpx69 Just some tidbits: In an after screening q&a session the author said he wanted to originally cast the movie in Albania, where it would IMO be a good fit with the patriarch governed extended families being the dominant societal organisational form and blood line revenge a.k.a. besa still alive in rural parts of Albania and Kosovo.But that region in the times of shooting of the film was not a particularly safe place for an itinerant cinematographer, so Hungary and Romania were chosen instead. This being perhaps fortunate for an intimate story of the film, it would be IMO hard to avoid a different political context, including war atrocities and mass rapings taking place in Kosovo at the time of shooting.Still the Katalin's impulse, and a quick decision to search for her rapist, would be clearer in rural Albania, as within the gossip run partially traditional and partially already modern Romanian village. We are therefore left to our own devices to figure out her motivation during the course of the movie, where the images of dark woods and music leading us to expect some Dracula offspring or something equally sinister to jump out any minute now, do not exactly help us there.The cinematography is really beautiful, the director commenting that it's not that difficult to be director of photography in Transylvania, where you have so many interesting things and locations to point your camera to. So many decisions about locations were made on the spot without much planning.The movie was envisioned, shot and brought to a rough cut on a 16mm film using a director's small inheritance of 30.000 Euro. He attributes his finding a producer to finance the blow-up to 35mm to pure luck, but without this luck probably no-one would ever see this very beautiful movie. At the point of my writing the distribution contracts and all the awards brought him about a third of this investment back.I have to mention the scene where Katalin tells the story of her being raped to her rapist and his wife, as something, that will remain in my memory for some time. Hilda Peter in the role of Katalin Varga is great. Much of the film's appeal is due to her and also other actor's performance.

dragossamoil a magic and a surreal story, very dark but very human; a story about destiny, punishment, revenge; an ethical ancestral story set in a magical time and place; we find only 3 things related with nowadays in scenes less than 30 seconds : cell phones, cars and the sound of a radio - everything else is eternal; similar with a Greek mythical story; katalin varga wants to punish but it's also punished for her actions; there is a justice - an action - reaction law that governs the live of the people in that Transylvanian villages // there is a justice - an action - reaction law that governs the live of the people in that Transylvanian villages //amazing sound , amazing images // 9 out of 10

Gecq Oh well, we have a directing debut here and quite an impressive one at that. Good camera, beautiful images and musical score, this narration is set in Hungarian-Romanian Transylvania.Spoiler: Our female Protagonist, impressively played by Hilda Péter, had been raped by two men in the past. When the truth about this incident which she had been hiding and which resulted in the birth of her only child, a son, comes to light ten years after, she is cast out by her husband and decides to take revenge on the men who raped her. She takes her wagon and her son and sets out on a journey of tracking down the men, planning on confronting and killing them. This narration clearly is based on Mihail Sadoveanu's famous novel "Baltagul" (The Hatchet) which is transforming the traditional Romanian theme of the ballad "Mioriţa" into a modern detective story and blending the traditional role of a Romanian woman into Modernism. Our protagonist starts on a similar journey but the ends which we are facing are showing cruelly how Sadoveanu's story could have ended more realistically.