Terror on the streets

It's as if the Iron Curtain had never lifted. That's the mood that Bela Tarr's film induces. Back in the Soviet oppression era, Eastern bloc film-makers had to put on disguise to get movies made or shown abroad.

In The Party and the Guests, Jan Nemec turned what begins as a picnic in the Czech woods into a banquet hosted by ruling thugs whose dogs pursued those fleeing the feast.

Miklos Jancso's The Round-Up created a choreography of fear out of the mounted police culling guerrillas from among the peasants on the Hungarian plains. With democracy, the need for such movies faded; their power remains.

Tarr's Hungarian vision of apocalypse thus seems both retro and contemporary. In a small East European town, grey as the monotone photography amid freezing mists and power cuts indoors and out that lets the director frame his people in an eternal chiaroscuro, a huge showman's pantechnicon trundles over the cobbles.

Inside is a giant stuffed whale, accompanied by a mysterious "prince". Its arrival has an oppressive effect. One curious boy (Lars Rudolph), whose uncle is a musicologist obsessed with disproving the hidden harmonies of the universe as promulgated by the 17th-century Andreas Werkmeister, pays his forints and whispers at the preserved mammal: "What harm you've caused in your time." And may again, is his unspoken thought.

Tarr is clearly setting up a symbol of totalitarianism that is disturbing, even posthumously. We see the "prince" only in silhouette, but his shadow is given substance by the grim showman who takes the money. It sounds as old as myths such as the Golem, man-made champion of oppressed Hebrews, or the malign enchanter of men and madmen in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

Paranoia spreads from the symbol on the square and envelopes everyone. The camera seldom moves; its immobile eye follows characters until they dwindle into vanishing points on an endless empty street.

Faces are set in formal masks of apprehension. The commonest viewpoint is from the rear of a character, following on his heels like a secret policeman. Violence arrives as if activated by the antediluvian denizen of the deeps.

The boy's aunt, estranged from her husband, seizes her chance to take advantage of the uncertainty and reason is overturned, confidence toppled, violence enlisted and the sick and dying in the hospitals toppled out of bed by an eerily silent mob.

Tarr's film was made long before "axis of evil" became a threat on Bush's lips. But the fears it sets loose are a creepily exact allegory of totalitarianism before Saddam's fall - and maybe after it, too. Dictatorships only change their symbols.

Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister Harmoniak)
Cert: 12A