'Katalin Varga' (2009) – Peter Strickland.

Maestro Peter Strickland's desperately haunting, visually sumptuous tale of a long-simmering, bitterly enacted revenge is an elegiac, eerily immersive masterpiece of sinisterly subtle power! With Hilda Péter as the cruelly exiled mother making for an utterly compelling, singularly striking figure as the righteously revenging matriarch, her stoical presence being no less beguiling than the ominously beautiful Romanian countryside she must traverse before grimly manifesting her doom-laden destiny!

'Katalin Varga' is an unusually competent, earnestly acted, obsidian dark melodrama that forcefully leads the viewer across vengefully rocky roads far less travelled! Strickland's increasingly menacing, crepuscular descent into a wronged woman's despair is a relentless, oppressive, progressively transfixing nightmare, and while you are uncomfortably aware her abject journey may not have a trite, salutary conclusion, you are nonetheless compelled to watch, since you can't help but empathise with the precarious fates of the preternaturally durable Katalin, and her charming, wholly innocent son, Orban.

'Katalin Varga' has all the sinewy grip of a multi-faceted, steel-taut thriller, but expresses many of the more refined, emotionally nuanced tenets one expects from the very best work of Ingmar Bergman. There's also a delightfully refreshing lack of hysteria, no irksome actorly histrionics, no cumbrous, literary quotes, the director Strickland is clearly in sync with both the compellingly lean story, and his uncommonly fine cast, as the inexorable existential terrors are implied rather than screeched, therefore making the dramatic climax that much more devastating to behold!