Filled with enough gyrating dead corpses to cast the next Zack Snyder movie several times over, director Péter Bergendy’s Hungarian horror flick Post Mortem is high on gore and jump scares, low on convincing storytelling and originality. It displays a solid level of craft, especially the heavy use of visual and makeup effects, but otherwise gets mired in too many clichés of the genre, stretching them out over a tiring two-hour running time.
Winner of numerous awards in its native Hungary, which has chosen Post Mortem to be its official international Oscar submission, as well as top prizes at a handful of festivals (Toronto After Dark, Fantasporto in Portugal), the film could make good fodder for streaming platforms looking to beef up their horror tabs with international features.
Set in a snow-covered Magyar village at the end of the First World War, the script (by Bergendy, Hellebrandt Gábor and Piros Zánkay) follows Tomás (Viktor Klem), a former German soldier who nearly died in combat and has now taken up a career as a photographer specializing in “post-mortems”—a genre popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries where family members would artfully pose beside their deceased love ones. Say cheese!
That morbid practice, which Bergendy (The Exam, Vault) and his craft team, including visual effects supervisor Zoltán Benyó and makeup artists Zita Sipos and Dániel Hámori (Sunset), compellingly recreate in the opening sections of the movie, is far more convincing to witness than many of the plot shenanigans that follow.
In a nutshell, Tomás is lured by Anna (Fruzsina Hais), a cute if slightly creepy little girl, to a remote farming town where a pile of corpses has accumulated due to the Spanish flu pandemic. The photographer has his work cut out for him, but then bad stuff starts happening: demonic shadows appear on the wall, doors slam shut in the night, and a slew of new corpses arrive—one in a rather impressive set-piece where a body is stuffed up a chimney à la Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
As Tomás begins to see more and more dead people, the film begins to run away from itself, losing whatever suspense it initially conjured up by doubling down on the scare tactics, which quickly fail to scare us. The entire second half of Post Mortem turns into one very long denouement where bodies are phantasmagorically dragged through the streets, tossed in the air and lit on fire, the townspeople standing by in horror — why don’t they just leave? — while Tomás and Anna try to understand what’s happening.
There’s an intriguing aspect to the film’s underlying conceit, which deals with how heavily death weighed upon the people of Hungary, and other European nations, in the wake of a war that saw over 20 million casualties, coupled with a pandemic that took 50 million lives worldwide. But Bergendy lets Post Mortem get too bogged down in histrionics and B-movie logic—he could have made what’s known as an “elevated genre” flick but instead has delivered something closer to Insidious: 1918, indulging in Hollywood excess rather than creating a work that feels uniquely Hungarian.
Director: Péter Bergendy
Screenplay: Péter Bergendy, Hellebrandt Gábor, Piros Zánkay
Cast: Viktor Klem, Fruzsina Hais, Judit Schell, Andrea Ladányi, Zsolt Anger
Producers: Ábel Köves, Tamás Lajos
Cinematography: András Nagy
Production design: Hujber Balázs
Costume design: Breckly Janos
Editing: István Király
Music: Attila Pacsay
Sound: Balázs Gábor
VFX Supervisor: Zoltán Benyó
Production company: Szupermodern Stúdió (Hungary)
World sales: Hungarian National Film Fund
In Hungarian, German
115 minutes
