There's a thing about Eastern European film industry. Hungarians, Czechs, Serbs, Poles are brilliant at depicting the worst times of their history on the silver screen, no matter the genre. We make the best sour comedies, dramas, love stories, mystery thrillers or even kids' movies set in the darkest times. That's how deeply the ordeals of our parents and grandparents run.
(On the other hand, we suck at traditional Western genres, such as action movies. We just don't like shootouts and superheroes. We don't understand America. We understand ourselves.)
Captives is a prime example of these filmmaking traditions. It's another movie set in the terrible 1950s, when Hungary was pretty much like North Korea, only with way less Koreans. As it's really the umpteenth movie about how terrible the Rakosi era was, one may expect it to be a forced and tired retelling of the same story. After all, even Hollywood ran out of anything new to say about WW2 since 'Saving Private Ryan'. But guess what? 'Captives' isn't tired at all, and it's definitely not boring. What's outright shocking is that the story isn't even fictional.
However, there's a certain and noticeable difference between the "vibe" of 'Captives' and classic movies set in the Stalinist era, such as 'Never, Nowhere, Nobody' (Soha, sehol, senkinek), 'Whooping Cough' (Szamárköhögés) or 'Lucky Daniel' (Szerencsés Dániel).
This movie was made by the millennial generation. This is not to say it's a bad movie: far from it. However, it's palpable how the creators, and also most of the actors, are from the first generation who neither experienced Communism, nor heard first hand accounts from those who were already adults during the worst times. After all, someone who was a young adult around 1950-55 would already be past 90. Most Hungarians rarely make it past 75...
This somehow makes this movie different. As excellent it is, it's somehow not as immersive and deeply shocking as some of the older movies were. You feel like peeking through a curtain into a long gone era, like a time traveler, and you know you can take a step back any time if you can't stand he horrors. In the 1980s you couldn't do that. The 1950s were still around us, its shadow haunting us. Today we're much more distanced from them.
If you find it difficult to understand this distinction, it's perhaps because you aren't an X-gen or Hungarian. But just look at movies about World War II. You will find how modern WW2 movies are very different from those made in the 1960s, 1970s, and not in a technical sense.
This is not the filmmakers' fault at all. They did their very best to deliver an amazing piece of cinema, and boy, did they deliver! But still: different era, different vibes. This is just my two cents about it. It's not even a bad thing. It means we finally stepped over the shadow of the 1950s, and buried our dead. Just like we did after so many other terrible events before. Good riddance. Let this movie stand as a memento to what we shouldn't ever allow to happen again.
