Lajos Kovács (WINGS OF DESIRE) stars as the misused Woyzeck, who ekes out a miserable existence sweeping train tracks, running errands for a bullying army captain and acting as a human guinea pig for a local doctor with ideas about free will. When his common-law wife begins an affair with a local cop, Woyzeck's pocket Bible and near-starvation diet point him on a downward spiral of twisted redemption.
Acting
Kovács' hollowed-out eyes deserve their own billing.
Cinematography
Train tracks as fate machinery—devastating.
Direction
Szász makes poverty feel like a slow-drowning.
Director
János Szász
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Büchner's 1837 fragment was unfinished at his death; every adaptation must choose its own ending, and Szász chose brutality.
Shot in Romania standing in for 1980s Hungary, the film's post-communist despair accidentally predicted 1990s Eastern European cinema's obsession with masculine collapse.
HU
