If it's possible for a film to be both forward-thinking and a throwback at the same time, this elliptical Hungarian entry checks both boxes with ease. By building the narrative around a neurologist, Hungarian casting director-turned-filmmaker Lili Horvát (The Wednesday Child) explores the strange workings of the human brain, but her second feature isn't a science fiction film. It's barely even a science film, despite the medical setting, since Horvát keeps the scientific mumbo-jumbo to a bare minimum. In its unsolvable mysteries, it has more in common with existential reveries, like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique. She introduces Márta (the magnetic Natasa Stork) as a 39-year-old woman who has just returned to Budapest after 20 years in New Jersey to rendezvous with János (director Viktor Bodó), a neurologist she met at a medical conference. They had an instant connection, and when he suggested they meet one month later at the city's Danube-spanning Liberty Bridge, she took him literally. So, she arrives at the appointed time and place, except he never shows. When she tracks him down and asks why he insists he's never seen her before. As he walks away, she crumples to the ground. A young man named Alex (Benett Vilmányi) helps to lift her up. Since she's recently accepted a position at the same hospital, she'll encounter both men again. She also starts seeing a therapist, because she can’t figure out why she feels so drawn to János, but that doesn’t stop her from tracking his every move, including a deep dive into his past by way of the internet. When she learns that he's a former choirboy, she follows him to a choral performance.
After she sees him getting into a car with another woman, her face falls, but she doesn't give up. His wariness about this odd woman shifts when they both end up operating on Alex's father. Marta impresses him with her surgical skill. After that, it’s a dance between the three principals as Alex becomes obsessed with the woman who saved his father's life just as János realizes that the same woman has been stalking him. If Horvát flirts with film noir by having characters shadow each other in the dark, Márta isn’t a femme fatale any more than János is a criminal mastermind, and neither one calls the cops on the other. Gradually, everything comes to a head, and the ending manages to split the difference between simple and profound. It’s to Horvát's credit that she never spells anything out, which means that Stork does more with her face and body than with the dialogue, so it's fortunate that she's a skilled performer who makes everything Márta does surprising on some level. In the end, the film's central mystery has more to do with the lies we tell each other—and ourselves—through the way we gravitate towards certain people, whether for good or for ill, isn't something medical science can ever completely explain. Highly recommended.