The more I watched Bela Tarr, the more frustrated I got with the glacial pacing. Its often the rationale of slow cinema to provoke the audience and test their powers of focus. You see, as life is. The pre conscious and sub conscious are battling to stop it being realised. Those features of a person, the sense of time endured and the laboured drip into the psyche of detail are one and different. Freud would have endured this I imagine. So would Jung. TWILIGHT is a test of enduring and passive watching. The story is simple enough. A seasoned detective is investigating a series of child murders. He wants answers but also cant accept those found. He wants to take this frustrated anger out on someone or thing that seems omnipresent, yet unseen. This sounds the stuff of Neo Noir, does it not?

It also sounds a lot like the post Soviet realisation of how coersive control from the state was. You knew it was there and as it was everywhere, you knew to fear and be frustrated by everything. Maybe that is what György Fehér film truly is about after it all is done. I felt that I was not alone here. Online others sensed it. But what do they know? All of the appreciations wax lyrical about its visual majesty (it truly both looks stunning and is), use of direction and temper of sound. Peter Strickland’s is the most rewarding. The Quay Brothers the most revealing (do not watch these before the film for that reason). But I couldn’t help being left a little cold. For me TWILIGHT, watched in the late evening, left me with an ominous dread. Its not easy to watch in terms of time and content. I warn you that it is harrowing. The obsessive human becomes like Dante in hell. A quest for the blackest heart of the blackest of beastly things. Human nature.

Product Features

• Twilight (Szürkület, 1990) presented from the new 4K restoration by the National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive, supervised and approved by cinematographer Miklós Gurbán
• A series of exclusive newly filmed appreciations by filmmakers: Quay Brothers, Peter Strickland, James Norton and critic Chris Fujiwara
• Newly filmed interviews with Twilight editor Mária Czeilk and cinematographer Miklós Gurbán
• Booklet featuring an expansive new essay by filmmaker and curator Stanley Schtinter
• Trailer
• New and improved English subtitle translation.
• World premiere on Blu-ray.
• Region free Blu-ray (A/B/C).