Kontroll, Sandor Csanyi, ... | EXCUSE ME. IS THIS THE STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN? Stop this boring train wreck of a film. We want to get off
Image credit: Kontroll: Adrienn Szabo
EXCUSE ME. IS THIS THE STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN? Stop this boring train wreck of a film. We want to get off
Movie Review

Kontroll (2005)

EW's GRADE
D

Details Limited Release: Apr 01, 2005; Rated: R; Length: 106 Minutes; Genres: Action/Adventure, Foreign Language; With: Sandor Csanyi and Zoltan Mucsi; Distributor: THINKFilm

Not since Luc Besson tracked circles around himself in the Paris Métro tunnels of Subway has a director employed an urban catacomb transport system as exhaustively — or exhaustingly — as Nimród Antal does in Kontroll. A subway is a ready-made dystopian movie set, and Antal, shooting in the Budapest underground (the world's second oldest), can't get enough of the steel gray fluorescent maze, the ominous slow drop of the escalators. The audience, however, gets more than enough. Antal has assembled what may be the single most colorless group of mangy lowlifes I have ever seen — a pack of inspectors whose job it is to harass the passengers already on trains into showing their tickets. (It's efficiency like this that killed Eastern European communism.) Their principal activity, though, consists of not liking each other and declaring it with repetitive abrasiveness. The hooded phantom who keeps popping up to shove passengers onto the tracks is the only figure in Kontroll with even a semblance of purpose.

Originally posted Mar 30, 2005 Published in issue #814 Apr 08, 2005 Order article reprints
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