The Game

Hungary during the Cold War. The secret service of the Kádár years embarks on an operation riskier than anything it has attempted before. Inside it, who is watching whom, who is informing on whom and who is really working for whom becomes blurred after a while for everyone involved. Péter Fazakas' film is a cold, low-tempo espionage thriller. Instead of action there are rooms, files and conversations, and the fear comes not from a weapon but from a wrong sentence. What the film is really about is how the state uses a person and how it drops them afterwards. It is one of the recent Hungarian productions to look at the state security apparatus of that period, and it neither manufactures heroes nor makes the past lighter.