For a film premise that is set in a contemporary Budapest rendered deceptively timeless in its mise-en-scene, a disturbing and compelling scenario follows. Hana Samaržija further explains why the debutante director and scriptwriter Bálint Dániel Sós won the unanimous approval of the jury this year.
In the third year of its relocation to Gorski Kotar’s woods, the annual Cinehill Film Festival – previously known as the Motovun Film Festival – proffered a thematically and geographically diverse competition. With principal subjects of female rebellion, inventive readings of the noir genre, and broken families, Cinehill’s official program paid tribute to this year’s recipients of the special Maverick award bestowed upon authors whose individuality and innovative approaches have broadened the scope of contemporary filmmaking, Jafar Panahi and Catherine Breillat. The official FIPRESCI jury – comprised of the Croatian literary and film critic, writer and theorist Hana Samaržija, Croatian video-journalist, critic, and documentary author Ana Stanić, and Slovenian film, television, and literary critic Tina Bernik – dedicated this year’s award to the Hungarian drama Growing Down (Minden Rendben), a formally innovative, stern, and emotionally resonant meditation on grief, trauma, and prejudice. Our unanimous verdict selected Growing Down both for its distinctive cinematography and its intelligent treatment of its subject matter. Within the taut duration of only eighty-five minutes, debutante director and scriptwriter Bálint Dániel Sós constructed a self-contained and exceptionally shrewd depiction of the opaque workings of grief. With the film’s stylish black-and-white photography, contemporary Budapest’s urban environment reverberates as a deceptively timeless setting for how its protagonists grapple with equally timeless human emotions.
Growing Down follows Sándor (Szabolcs Hajdu), a handsome recent widower pursuing a promising new relationship with the divorced Klára (Anna Hay). Sándor and Klára’s efforts to maintain a wholesome, sincere, and stable family life for Sándor’s two sons and Klára’s affable daughter Sári (Zonga Jakab-Aponyi) are thwarted by Sándor’s troubled twelve-year-old son Dénes (a haunting debut performance by Ágoston Sáfrány). Determined not to scorn his son for his disconcerting resistance to his new family and defiant antics, Sándor justifies Dénes’s behavior to his school and encourages him to channel his struggles through boxing lessons. When Sári decides she wants to share her twelfth birthday party with her new stepbrother in Klára’s modernist family home, a brief tour through the house’s lush surroundings and empty pool functions as a Chekhov’s gun for development of the film’s plot. While Sári obsesses over her new Persian cat and strives to enliven an indifferent Dénes, a benign children’s game takes a grim turn. During a game of tag, Sári falls into her mother’s empty pool and remains comatose in a black puddle of blood. Although Sándor and a desperate Klára regard the tragedy as an accident, Sándor is being dishonest. With the viewership’s knowledge molded by Sándor’s perspective, we believe to have witnessed what Sándor is desperate to conceal: Dénes deliberately killing his new stepsister by pushing her into an empty pool. This plot device will continue to inform the remainder of the film, which examines and challenges our implicit prejudice without an ounce of narrative flab.
When Sándor confronts Dénes about what he – and we, as focalized through Sándor’s perspective – has seen, he doesn’t allow any alternative depiction of events to challenge his view. Sándor dishonestly comforts his desperate partner, visits an unresponsive Sári in the hospital, steals the footage from Klára’s allegedly defective closed-circuit television camera, and employs false pretenses to probe his attorney friend about the legal prospects of a twelve-year-old child involved in a violent accident. Our infrequent excursions to Dénes’s point of view reveal a boy profoundly traumatized by his mother’s recent passing. Dénes assaults a classmate accusing him of murdering his stepsister and submits disturbing essays featuring his dead mother’s character in bizarre settings. Sándor’s single-minded decision to keep his son out of juvenile prison leaves no room for his son’s perspective of the tragedy, and the audience is complicit. As we blindly accept the verdict that Dénes’s unnerving behaviors and brash reactions indeed belong to a child capable of killing a stepsister competing for his father’s attention, Dénes’s attempts to tell Sándor what had genuinely happened remain unheard. Kristóf Deák’s sophisticated photography and the film’s exceptional sound mixing imbue the story with additional nuance. Although the characters use smartphones, the monochromatic cinematography akin to Paweł Pawlikowski’s mature works transforms the film’s Budapest into a timeless setting, and background noises give way to deafening silences as Dénes speaks to police officers and confronts his father’s reluctance to listen to him. With a final plot twist seldom as unexpected in contemporary film, Growing Down establishes trans-generational trauma as a self-fulfilling prophecy and reveals Sándor to be as thoroughly overcome by grief and terrified of further loss as his maladjusted son. Finally, Growing Down positions its writer-director Bálint Dániel Sós as an author significantly more mature than most of his fellow contemporary, more experienced filmmakers.
Hana Samaržija
Edited by Steven Yates
© FIPRESCI 2025