A hopeless barfly in a desolate Hungarian mining town attempts to double cross a local rival, only to lay the seeds for his own destruction. But what sounds like a familiar film noir tale is anything but in Damnation, the 1988 film from Béla Tarr which placed the Hungarian director at the vanguard of a new cinematic movement that would come to be known as Slow Cinema.
Karrer (Miklos Szekely) has little in his life apart from a local bar called the Titanik, and the torch he carries for his ex-lover (Vali Kerekes). When he is offered a role in a local smuggling operation, he senses an opportunity to frame her husband (Gyorgy Cserhalmi) and win her for himself. That the scheme will go horribly long is predictable. But Tarr uses this everyday story of human betrayal to explore much bigger themes, and greater truths.
Tarr, whose previous films were essentially works of social realism, would take a dramatic creative turn with Damnation, which established the director’s signature high contrast black and white cinematography, slow and complex tracking shots, and conjuring of poetic, repetitive, and bleak atmosphere. Utilising an extraordinary locale and turning it into something spectral and almost alien, Damnation is a vision of the human condition that is at once desiccated and divine.