Twilight (1990)
György Fehér's Twilight is the epitome of atmosphere, a culmination of audiovisual transcendence. Fehér, a protégé of fellow collaborator and master director Béla Tarr, remade the German film It Happened in Broad Daylight. His idea for it is cerebral, shedding attachments to structure and transitioning into shapeless territory. It centers on a detective, played by Péter Haumann, who is hunting down The Giant, a murderer. He remains elusive, only existing through pencil sketches done by the local schoolchildren, who happen to be the sole victim demographic. Fehér's construction of the ominous man is akin to that of a folklorian child eater, constantly transformative in image by word of mouth, although here he is without motive. His character, or lack thereof, is a central mechanism for the narrative, melting into the brooding evil pervading the woodlands. The detective's chase is similar to Bong Joon-Ho's Memories of Murder if we were to integrate the gracefulness of dark noir and streamline the complexity of a mystery to matters of perception. It's inherently tragic as soon as we've begun, foreshadowing an intangible essence of emptiness and fruitless effort, as seen in the investigative procedures.
Fehér juxtaposes the concept of justice against the pace of time, often the slowest when one is desperately in search. To effectively capture an emanating ambience, Fehér and cinematographer Miklós Gurbán create an incredibly ethereal experience of filmmaking finesse and understanding the intended narrative messages down to a tee. The film opens with an overhead shot of a forest, as if to signify that man has no control over the work of entities that hover above us. It actually closes in the same exact way, sort of creating a circular microcosm of paranoia. Throughout the rest of the film, the shot selection and directing style are unsettling, quite literally mimicking the element of staring into the distance in thought. Nearly every major scene concludes the interaction, and the camera will sit still, lingering and unintrusively observing the seemingly barren location, posing a multitude of questions for us and the detective. However, Gurbán's camerawork is typically only static upon reaching the end of the lengthy scenes and is very mobile during dialogue. There's no real rhyme or reason for the long takes, and perhaps you could classify it as a discipline of Hungarian cinema, but ultimately, Fehér aims to gradually disorient the viewer.
The characters pose a bit of arbitrariness in the narrative, simply situated in the right places long enough to contribute to the omnipresent melancholy. Aside from the detective and a few other adults, the subject of patient scrutiny is children. There is a young boy and girl in particular that's filmed closely and lightly interrogated. During the questioning, we see them as naive creatures of innocence, not quite grasping the gravity of the situation at hand. While the young boy is asked about his classmate, the girl who is pronounced dead in the opening minutes, he playfully answers with vague clues about The Giant. The straightforward, childish candidness cleverly contrasts against the deep-seated misery as it slowly, like the film itself, builds a tense uneasiness, suggesting the detective's simmering frustration. This abstract tonality is once again maximized through the camera's lens, and the nature of the lowkey mood is directed through dolly shots. The camera's lateral movement will slide across the set, glimpsing the setting and the people. Fehér chooses to sometimes immediately cut away when a character is speaking, generating off-kilter timing, although rarely when it's a child, because in those scenes we are claustrophically close to their face, dodging eyes, and unblinking stares.
Twilight is a thoroughly captivating, even if suffocating, contemplation on time and the insecurities of closed-off rural communities. The stifling feeling in open space can only be described as the anxiety of remote villages isolated from the rest of the world. Over the course of weeks and later months, as the detective comes to the realization that his efforts are futile, the audience begins to fall into a similar lull. Not being able to find The Giant is perhaps, in some capacity, inevitable. It soon becomes the expected course for the case to go cold because human senses are gullible and easily allured, unable to pinpoint what's not obvious. Fehér produces a shivery, ghostly edge with visual precision, further amplified with a beautiful 4K resotration. The new look highlights the grainy parts of the frame, distinguishing hues of smoky grayscale under an angle pointed towards misty hillsides and mountains. Twilight elevates the imminent despair, arguably existentialism, using the versatility of darkness, sometimes a silhouette and other times a shadow. Down the winding roads, a giant lies in wait.