On Body and Soul (2017)

Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul takes place largely in an abattoir, a bold setting for a romance and a bolder one for a film that wants us to find tenderness inside it. Endre, the financial officer, and Mária, the new quality inspector, discover that they dream the same dream each night: two deer moving through a snowy forest, drinking from the same stream. In daylight they are awkward, guarded, and largely incapable of the small talk that romance supposedly requires. The film observes them with patience. It does not raise its voice.

Mária is autistic, and the film treats this as a fact of her character instead of a lesson to be delivered. She grades the meat without compromise, repeats conversations to herself at night to locate her errors, recoils from touch, and finds the world too loud. Enyedi films these details plainly, without pity and without a podium. The performance by Alexandra Borbély is precise and unsentimental. The supporting cast is Hungarian throughout, and the film's interest in a woman's interior life, her halting sexual awakening, her curiosity about pornography and park benches and romantic music, is genuine, though it never organizes itself into a political program.

The result is a quiet film about two people who cannot say what they mean. It has no interest in scolding anyone. The slaughterhouse raises questions about animals that the film declines to answer, and the dreams are left as dreams. We are given loneliness, a bathtub, a phone call, and a small mercy. It is a strange and gentle piece of work, and it never once tells us how to feel about it.