Treasure City review – bizarre, oppressive and horribly brutal

A one-night-in-the-city movie from Hungary with an ensemble cast interconnecting and interrelating in bizarrely unexpected ways; the city in question is perhaps Budapest, though it was filmed in Cluj, in Romania. The keynotes are anger, confusion and despair, and to some degree the film could have been opaque or contrived but its malaise ultimately finds expression in a truly horrible #MeToo moment, one of the most brutally plausible and unsettling I have seen in any film recently.

The cast are various: the organisers of a protest against the reactionary government have a row over competency, and an associate of theirs has a romantic moment with a Mohawk-haired teen son of a sourly depressed pastor and his angry wife. A woman has a furious row with a rude and supercilious sales assistant in a flower shop. Her husband is enraged to hear of a sad romantic escapade in the past and their 10-year-old daughter turns out to have magic powers. They have a link with an intimate and experimental “living room theatre” troupe whose deeply unpleasant director is a predatory rapist, furnishing this movie with the climactically horrendous scene near the end. And so it goes on, with the various lives playing out more or less simultaneously.

This is an odd film, opaque and withdrawn, and with a muted and discreet kind of surrealism, particularly in its cafe scenes, that reminded me a little of directors such as Roy Andersson or Aki Kaurismäki, only without the emollient touch of comedy. Quite a lot of the movie is oppressively sexualised, in ways that create a charged and dangerous atmosphere, but also somehow unrewarding. Where is it all leading? That isn’t clear, though the abuse scene seems to grow like a dark flower from the estrangement and unhappiness that has gone before.

• Treasure City is in cinemas and on digital platforms from 18 June.