Natural Light: Chilly exposition of wartime atrocities

Corporal István Semetka (Ferenc Szabó) is part of a special unit occupying the Soviet Union during the war. Using two Ukrainian translators, he and his troop are charged with rooting out Soviet partisans or anyone who would fight back against the Nazi interlopers. Semetka is not the cruellest among the soldiers. When he follows a girl with a morsel of pilfered cheese, he turns a blind eye. We know few details of his background save for a “tall, fine son at home”.  Watching Dénes Nagy’s Natural Light is a frustrating experience. On every technical level – from cinematographer Tamás Dobos’s claustrophobic sepia compositions to Ferenc Szabó’s inscrutable central performance to sound designer Jocelyn Robert’s use of bracken and footfall – it’s worth beholding.    Its central narrative, which asks the viewer to consider that the Fascists suffered during World War II, is rather more problematic.    The styling of the non-professional Russian cast as maggoty peasants set beside the noble carriages of Semetka and his stoical comrade and war criminal Koleszar (Bajko Laszlo).is not a good look.   When Semetka’s unit commits an atrocity, he is deployed elsewhere, a diversion that works as a free pass. The poker-faced character’s closely-shot head and shoulders echo that same trope in Son of Saul but with none of the latter film’s humanity.     Adapted from a section of Pál Závada’s 2014 novel, from the first wintry opening shot in which hunters hack away at a dead deer, Natural Light is a chilly, unknowable film, one that repeatedly evokes brutality and the more desolate tableaux found in Andrei Tarkovsky’s work to deadening effect. The intention may have been to simulate the dehumanising effects of war. The anaesthetising effect achieves little beyond the film’s carefully muted aesthetic.