Despite one major complaint and a couple of minor ones, I was impressed with this film. It's a definite thumbs-up. Since it has a lot of twists and turns, I'll try to cover the main stuff without ruining the ending for those of you who intend to watch it.
The story takes place in Budapest. It opens with a young woman, Marta, being stalked on a metro train by two thuggish guys. She gets off the train and makes a run for it; the guys split up to look for her; she catches one and kills him.
Meanwhile, there's a couple named Adam and Lisa not getting along very well in an apartment. Marta scopes this apartment out from a diner across the street and heads over there after Lisa leaves for work, more or less bursting in and then fainting in Adam's arms.
Adam finds the bloody knife on Marta and tries to call the police but can't get through to anyone who speaks English. Marta comes to, and then the fun starts. She seems mainly intent on trying to find out as much as she can about Adam's personality and his relationship with Lisa so she can figure out the quickest way to seduce him, and when he starts to let her do that she nearly kills him with the knife.
Herein lies the major complaint: Adam almost behaves as you'd expect someone to behave in a situation like that, but not quite. Even after this incident he lets her hang around - he starts to throw her out and seems serious about doing that, but not quite serious enough to accomplish it. Considering that he finds out about the metro murder from earlier that morning and is certain that Marta is the culprit, and clearly considers her to be a wacko (a wacko with a bloody knife she's much too fond of), the implausibility of his letting her hang around for any length of time throws the whole thing into the Bad Movie category early on. However, the story recovers from that problem pretty quickly and lands on its feet quite nicely, so we'll let it slide. If he'd thrown her out when he should have - or gotten through to the police - there wouldn't have been any movie.
Marta finally tells Adam her story. She was married to one Barnabas, had a little girl named Katalin, and was working as a waitress in a fairly upscale restaurant which was frequented by one Jozsef Kovacs (Prochnow), whom nobody liked because he used to be a Big Communist. Now he's a Big Entrepreneur. Marta liked him, though; he liked her too. Kovacs set Marta and her family up in a nice apartment for free and subsequently tried to persuade her to leave her husband. After she refused, Kovacs burst in with a goon one night. Barnabas was dragged off and killed, Marta was dragged off and beaten and raped, and Katalin was dragged off and kidnapped.
Now Kovacs' goons are chasing Marta around. Marta has returned to the apartment she used to live in - Adam and Lisa's apartment - to wait for Katalin to run off and join her there.
When goon #2 tracks Marta to the apartment, she escapes while the goon and Adam get into a fight. Afterward, the goon, an alleged cop, tells a completely different story: Marta is Kovacs' daughter, and she's nuts. Adam ends up getting Kovacs on the phone, and Kovacs says the same thing. Marta is his daughter, she's dotty, her husband Barnabas is the one who had abused her, and Katalin is dead, having been murdered by Marta. In imparting this information, the goon and Prochnow are both utterly credible.
Then Kovacs gets off the phone and gives some instructions to an employee regarding his daughter, who then turns to someone else and says, "I didn't know he had a daughter, did you?"
Hmmmm.
Then you spend the rest of the movie watching quite a bit of cat-and-mouse among all the players while trying to figure out who the villains and victims really are. And nicely played out it is, too.
Minor complaint 1: a couple of slow segments involving just Adam and Marta which do nothing to develop character or move the story along.
Minor complaint 2: it seemed to me there was way too much dialog-mumbling in this film, though I freely confess to being half deaf anyway. Prochnow was the only one who spoke up properly all the time. I had to turn the volume up to a ridiculous level to catch what everyone else was saying in most scenes. Maybe it was a sound-editing problem.
I may also as well mention a gripe about the score, as it screamed TANGERINE DREAM. I don't know who did the music because the end credits were microscopic, but some of you may have to grit your teeth when you hear the stuff. (They threw me a bone though, and slipped a little Penderecki De Natura Sonoris theme in there at one point, which made me smile.)
The movie contains an odd little tease having Lisa clearly interested in another man she knows at work, who breaks her heart by taking up with another coworker. Interesting, but it kind of comes out of nowhere and doesn't make any particular point that I can divine, Possibly there was more to it that got edited out. As it is, it's a non-sequitur and I would rather have seen it incorporated into the story better than that.
Ho comments regarding Prochnow: bad hair (think IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS meets KILL CRUISE). I forgive them for that, though, because they put him in the sharpest-looking business suits I've ever seen and he cut a hell of a figure in this movie. I hope that when the filming wrapped up he stuffed all those clothes in his suitcase and took them home with him.
In general, I very much like the way this movie was made. A couple of the actors could easily have irritated me, but managed not to; I enjoyed all the performances. As an ensemble they were a real treat to watch. You can also have a good time just admiring the sets, decoration, lighting and camera work in this film, all done very creatively and to wonderful effect. The whole thing just looks swell.
A shame that Prochnow's role wasn't larger, as it was tailor-made for him. Scary bad guy... no, wait - sweet, loving father... no, now he's an evil liar... no, he's a good guy... no...
Now that was fun.