It’s 1943. A particularly cruel winter has swept through the occupied Soviet Union. Its rural territories are an endless landscape of frosty forests, pocked with horse-swallowing sinkholes. Making do amid the bitter freeze, two hunters float down a misty river on a makeshift raft. With them they carry their latest prize: a hefty buck, provisions for a month or so in current conditions, one would think, well rationed. Understandably skittish, they spot a soldier at the edge of the river. His voice echoes through the cold air: “Come to shore!” A rifle is brandished with gusto. As it would come to pass, their caution has been well warranted.
More soldiers descend from the woods and make for the carcass like ravenous dogs: they hack away with pocket knives, hungrily freeing the deer of its skin. The meat is packed into bags. Their bounty secured, they ascend inland, leaving as quickly as they came. The hunters are left with the scraps. This, the prologue to Denes Nagy’s understated feature debut “Natural Light,” sets a desolate tone from which the film hardly deviates: here, morality plays second fiddle to survival, and compassion is stripped to the bones.
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The soldiers are part of a special unit charged with rooting out Soviet partisans in Hungary’s ramshackle villages. Our window into the group is Istvan Semetka (Ferenc Szabo), once an average joe farmer, now the group’s second-in-command. The horrors of “Natural Light” are acutely felt through Szabo’s performance, a truly canny casting: he gives Semetka one hell of a poker face, his objections subtly telegraphed by his glassy eyes and quivering hands. Elevated by cinematographer Tamas Dobos’ moody, claustrophobic shot design, he does much of the film’s emotional heavy lifting.
The bulk of the action takes place across a number of days, during which the unit makes camp in an occupied village, placed there to interrogate suspected partisans. To say the least, the villagers do not take kindly to their brash guests. There is something of a thaw, however, between the brass and the village elders, who share a banquet of plentiful rations, trading jovialities, and homemade booze. Their occupation is, nonetheless, undergirded by a constant, foreboding tension, punctuated by moments of cruelty: a thief is made to crawl under a table like a pig, and women are displaced from their beds. Jocelyn Robert’s soundscape greatly emphasizes heightening anxieties, from the squelchy crunch of icy mud under the soldiers’ boots, to the snapping of branches and twigs that echoes through the shadowy woodlands.
For a film that so often trades in claustrophobic close-ups, some of the strongest compositions in “Natural Light” are its grander landscape shots, making a sinister beast of Hungary’s jagged treelines. Shooting in 2.39 aspect ratio might strike as an odd artistic choice given just how proximate Dobos keeps to his subjects, but here it serves a strong visual juxtaposition. On the obverse, the film’s color palette feels a tad derivative, dominated with the desaturated, muddy greens and greys of myriad war films gone by (indeed, as you might’ve already presumed, there’s much hat-tipping to Elem Klimov’s great “Come and See”). Some of the said landscape shots, nonetheless, use the film’s color scheme to great (and novel) effect, the soldiers’ olive trench coats fading into the endless terrain around them, adding to the overbearing sense of an invisible threat.
The film is moderately paced, trading action for atmosphere up until the final third, with the arrival of reinforcements and the eerily stoic Capt. Koleszar (Bajko Laszlo). Relinquished from his duties, Semetka is sent on a mission to some conveniently distant marshlands. The film’s central tragedy occurs off-screen, and upon his return, Semetka is grasped by a terrible dilemma. Here, really, is a tale as old as war: the common man corrupted by the horrors of conflict. It is the atrocity that most explicitly realizes Nagy’s central moral question: how long can one remain silent in the face of evil? Whatever the answer, a husk is all that’s left where Semetka once stood. [B]
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