Huba

"Female hands on an old male's stomach, kneading it stronger and stronger, intrusive, painful." The suggestive opening sentence of the screenplay expresses more than one hallmark of the Sasnals' filmmaking style: fragmentary narrative, naturalistic detail, attention to corporality. The backdrop to their latest motion picture is a nameless industrial city. The belly from the opening image belongs to a man whose life has been sucked out by the factory, just like parasite sucks lymph from its host. The same flat is inhabited by a mother and her newborn baby whose relation to the man remains unclear. "She lies down on the floor to breastfeed it; the child crawls over her, messes up her hair, drools on her face; dry saliva stinks of milk. The child is on her stomach, flat, grown onto it." The image of the improbable trinity conspicuously resembles the biblical archetype of the Holy Family. Parasite is an uncompromising and excitingly open film that demands equal openness on the part of the audience. (IFF Bratislava)