Semmelweis

Lajos Koltai's 2023 Hungarian film is set in nineteenth-century Vienna. Women are dying of an unexplained illness in the maternity clinic at frightening rates, and the physician Ignác Semmelweis sets out to find the cause. What he arrives at is simple and, for the time, unacceptable: doctors go from performing autopsies to attending births without washing their hands. He makes washing compulsory and the deaths fall, but his colleagues take it as an accusation against themselves and shut him out. The film tells the discovery not as a triumph but as a story of institutional resistance, with Semmelweis growing more aggressive and more isolated at the centre. The period design and hospital scenes are detailed. The tone is heavy and the ending sorrowful. Who it's for: viewers curious about historical drama and the history of science. Who it's not for: anyone who would rather not approach scenes of surgery and childbirth; the film does not avoid showing them.