Hukkle

One of the quirkiest films in our Total Cinema series, and one of the quietest, Hukkle invites you to listen. Told almost entirely without dialogue, it’s a bucolic portrait of a Hungarian village, and, on the sly, a murder mystery…

An old man hiccups. He shuffles slowly about his morning ritual and then takes his place on a bench outside his cottage, beside the road, still hiccuping. A goose goes about its business. Flies buzz. A cat earns its living. A runaway cart causes a stir in the village. The old man hiccups.

The film is alive to sound; we spend observant, introspective hours in a Hungarian hamlet where nothing much seems to happen — oh, except that there’s a suspicious death, possibly even a murder.

Luminous… If you’re attracted to pure, exquisitely photographed cinematic depictions of the world, you could almost lie down in Hukkle as if it were a meadow and soak in its sun-drenched atmosphere. The film has hardly any spoken words, and except for a scene of a church chorus, the sounds humans make are treated as another manifestation of environmental noise on a teeming soundtrack. But as the movie builds up its bucolic vision, it also teases you with enigmatic clues to an actual murder in the rural Hungarian village where it takes place. You don’t have to piece together these clues to be satisfied with the film. It works just fine as a sophisticated wildlife documentary with a submerged narrative.

The New York Times

Half wildlife documentary and half murder mystery, Hukkle represents an unlikely but successful cross-pollination of genres, with some flashes of genuinely freakish inspiration.

Neil Young

Sparkling and thought-provoking, Hukkle is the cinematic equivalent of a puzzle box wrapped up in ethnic enigmas and rural riddles. These elements complicate a simple story of death and deception. Its style — part documentary, part thriller — experiments with the lexicon of film, exploring new ways of telling a story… This may sound darkly comic, yet Hukkle is so much more. It’s a naturalist film noir, an adult version of a Grimm’s fairy tale… Hukkle is one of the most controlled and intricate films ever made. Pálfi provides the basics — actors, action, settings — and it is up to us to put it all together, to make Hukkle hilarious or harrowing.

Bill Gibron, Pop Matters

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