What causes the stolid patriarch to start choking during a dour meal with his wife and sons, complain of a burning fever and shortly afterward die is not certain. Poison? The creepiness starts before the meal is over. Are we to read anything into the particularly bright eyes of the older boy, Alpar Fogarasi's Janos, shdowed with copycat unswervingness by his younger brother Erno (Szabolcs Gergely)? Or the inscrutability in the large liquid eyes of Maia Morgenstern's unsmiling wife suddenly widowed? Just as none of them seemed happy, or anything but muffled, when their stern paterfamilias was alive, so now do they march through the nominal grieving period with deadpan faces that give nothing away.
Is it that they have nothing to give? Or that they themselves are unaware of the festering drives growing inside them? Withdrawing into the attic of their underlit house and the dark labyrinths of their own interiors, they put poker-faced distance between themselves and their mother, especially after she introduces another man to the boys at one of their joyless family dinners, and urges them to regard the newcomer as incipient man of the house. If rage is driving the boys, they don't let it show consciously, except when it erupts in a fight with a classmate at school. The signal that they are tipping into a danger zone starts when the dissection of a frog at school leads to their stealing a neighbor's dog, then killing it.
They raise the ante, seeking power over death by ritualizing it, fetishizing an owl as a figure of nocturnal power, the perfect appurtenance to their increasing amounts of time spent in the snowy graveyard not far from their house. But they torment and kill the owl, their eyes growing ever brighter with shared secrets and complicity. Then they veer into sex. It's a potent narrative detour because the resolute savagery of their torture and killing of the animals, abetted by frequent visits to the graveyard next door, is replaced by something else when sex enters the picture. When it does, first with the older boy's clumsy attempt to force himself on the housemaid, then with their mutual fixation on Iren, employed in a red-light district bordello, we realize what innocents they are, and how much more terrifying innocence can be than something more overtly sinister.
Their innocence makes them scary because it imbues their actions with a purity and intensity that no worldly, self-aware criminal could muster. When they meet Dominka Ostalowska's Iren, fixation becomes supercharged by adolescent passion. In her room in the whorehouse, their fetishizing, obsessive ways take the form of bedecking her naked body with flower petals plucked from the schoolboy bouquet they bring her. Unused to such regard (we first see her being thrown harshly out of a carriage hired by a customer eager to have done with her once he has used her), she's flattered. But inevitably cost enters the picture as Ostalowska tinges Iren's coquettishness and her moments of something like tender regard with a growing impatience to get paid.
The boys' faces stay sweet. Szasz often makes them look as beatific as angels. But their pathology deepens to a visual counterpoint of the swirling smoke in the looming darkness outside. It's even more wintry inside their gloomy, joyless house. If their initial contact with sex demystifies the boys, their mother, played with a dark inscrutableness by Morgenstern, remains mysterious, or at least an unlocked vessel. We're given no information about the family's finances. Do they have deep pockets? Do the dartings of their remote mother's eyes represent desperation in the face of impending ruin? Or her own descent into madness? One thing we know. We are not headed toward a happy ending. Szasz and the seemingly sleepwalking but unmistakably inexorable Witman Boys keep the promise they make to us, leading us to the edge of a nightmare, and shoving us into its horrific core.
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by Jay Carr
