Like the grimy subway trains ratcheting through its backdrops, Nimród Antal's terrific feature debut Kontroll takes some time to get up to speed—but once it's fully underway, it develops a heady momentum and a devastating impact. Antal spent nine months fighting for permission to shoot in the Budapest subway system, and only acquired it by agreeing to add a pre-film disclaimer clarifying that Kontroll is not a documentary, and is not representative of the lives of actual Hungarian transit authorities. That seems highly unnecessary; only the kinds of minds that decried Trainspotting as a glorification of heroin use could interpret Kontroll's lunatic melodrama as non-fiction.
Sándor Csányi stars as a subway inspector tasked with moving from train to train, fining passengers who don't have properly validated tickets. The job is thankless and dull: In a series of viciously comic vignettes, Csányi and his squad (including an aggressive narcoleptic and an enthusiastic but ineffectual newbie) are insulted, assaulted, duped, hit on, and simply ignored by the jaded and hostile crowds that pack the trains. Antal launches enough plot threads to throw the movie into chaos—among other things, an arrogant rival ticket-inspector group, a murderer pushing commuters in front of trains, a drunken train-driver whose daughter rides the rails in a bear suit, a giddy young fare-jumper who counts coup against Csányi and company, and an inspector on the edge of a breakdown all jostle for screen time. Kontroll initially seems anarchic and unfocused, more a series of anguished sketches than a linear film.
But as each encounter clarifies Csányi's background and his personality, he emerges as a surprisingly sympathetic leading man, one who's voluntarily locked himself into a dim, dirty subterranean madhouse in order to escape a different breed of madness, and one whose perspective unifies Kontroll into an increasingly propulsive and streamlined narrative that peaks with a breathless long tracking shot through a claustrophobic train tunnel. Antal's bold compositions and hyperbolic color—reminiscent again of Trainspotting, as is Antal's punchy editing and grime-chic aesthetic—are consciously flashy but assured, the work of an artist with a thoroughly integrated visual and textual vision. It's a striking debut, the kind of gritty, light-starved film that makes sunlight seem pallid, intrusive, and wan by comparison.