I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Great, atmospheric effort from Strickland. I can only imagine he had some affinity with this part of Romania whether from childhood or other. The soundtrack and some of the slow lingering shots (esp. the scene looking at child, mother and horse not moving from behind, and the forest shot) were very affecting, and reminded me of Tarkovsky (not in a bad way ;)I got to thinking of the inextricable nature of all things, of how everything (as a single glorious 'entity') was so deviously and religiously bound up that to even attempt to extract something from it was tantamount to destructuring the whole (and thus destroying its royalty). That a film can inspire me (it has to be said not single-handedly)to such ends is indicative of a deep metaphysical quality within it.There is a particular sentence that the man utters towards the end of the film that resonates deeply towards this metaphysis. I shan't explicate it, nor even repeat it, but you shall know it when you hear it.Thanks for this Strickland, and all who were involved in and outside it (even the guy who carted the extra film stock when, presumably, you ran out ;) 'Ultimately, there are no parts at all.' Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life.

I saw the movie at the Vancouver International Film Festival and was disappointed. The plot or story about a raped woman looking for vengeance has had much potential. It is shown in one very good scene when she tells her story on a boat with one of her former tormentors and his new wife without revealing who she really is. But overall, the scenes were attached to each other without a flow, sometimes with music coming from a horror movie which didn't suit the reflections she had while travelling with her son through the beautiful mountains. It is an opportunity wasted. Though, I am generally interested to see what is coming from those former communist East European countries. They might have many stories to tell based on the things which have been swept under the carpet.

't easy to follow, since a lot of the plot and background story is told little by little.But the visuals is enough to watch this film. The cinematography and composition is something I haven't seen in a while. I gather the film was shot on 16mm, but that doesn't bother at all. On the contrary, it gives a small personality to the film.The only weaknesses which I found were in the script. It's somehow difficult to follow, although understandable. But, because it was difficult to follow, it was difficult to get emotionally attached.But as an art house film, it is a must see. Maybe not for the big public, but for the film buff.

Oh well, we have a directing debut here and quite an impressive one at that. Good camera, beautiful images and musical score, this narration is set in Hungarian-Romanian Transylvania.Spoiler: Our female Protagonist, impressively played by Hilda Péter, had been raped by two men in the past. When the truth about this incident which she had been hiding and which resulted in the birth of her only child, a son, comes to light ten years after, she is cast out by her husband and decides to take revenge on the men who raped her. She takes her wagon and her son and sets out on a journey of tracking down the men, planning on confronting and killing them. This narration clearly is based on Mihail Sadoveanu's famous novel "Baltagul" (The Hatchet) which is transforming the traditional Romanian theme of the ballad "Mioriţa" into a modern detective story and blending the traditional role of a Romanian woman into Modernism. Our protagonist starts on a similar journey but the ends which we are facing are showing cruelly how Sadoveanu's story could have ended more realistically.