Rating: NR | Runtime: 105 minutes
Release Date: March 28th, 1991 (Hungary) / May 24th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Arbelos Films
Director(s): György Fehér
Writer(s): György Fehér / Friedrich Dürrenmatt (film Es geschah am hellichten Tag)

Chasing a murderer who most likely does not exist.

I’d say that the ambiguity felt while watching György Fehér’s Twilight was my own fault if it weren’t for the fact that the film is devoid of character names. And since the opening scene is so dark that we cannot discern which of the two men in the back of a car is talking while en route to the crime scene of a murdered little girl, it’s nearly impossible to decipher who is still on the force and who isn’t.

This is especially true upon watching the investigation unfold with cops conducting their questioning as Péter Haumann eavesdrops from a distance around corners, beneath windows, or behind closed doors. The assumption is therefore that he’s the retired officer. He’s the one who won’t let this case go, interjecting his way in as a private citizen. So, it gets more confusing later when he’s the one trying to convince someone else to come back.

As such, I found myself lost as to the finer points of the plot until reading a synopsis of the 1958 novella The Pledge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt that inspired Fehér’s script (which was also a retool of the film Dürrenmatt wrote that same year entitled It Happened in Broad Daylight). Finally, things began to come into focus—that the drunk living and working at a gas station along a desolate road that Haumann tried to cajole back to the force is the actual retired officer that is brought to the first crime scene.

Or is he? Since this is a fact that could be made clear with names and expository dialogue, keeping it shrouded in secrecy throughout with faces in shadow or cropped off-screen when speaking relevant information must be intentional. Fehér wants confusion. He wants us to conflate these men as if both are different versions of the same character, desperate to capture a killer that may have already been found.

I keep circling back to a conversation Haumann has with a professor. It’s the only scene in the entire film that provides reaction shots even if they demand as much patience with their deliberate, static setups as everything else. Haumann wants to know this aging man’s opinion about a suspect in custody only for them to move onto more esoteric leanings towards the idea of evil rather than its physical presence.

The professor warns the detective that even if the man he seeks exists (a serial murderer hypothesized by Haumann to have come from another town), catching him won’t matter. We as human beings want so vehemently to eradicate evil, but inevitably discover more always takes its place. Stop one monster and another is born to pick right back off where he left.

It’s a nihilistically disturbing yet philosophically sound notion that aligns perfectly with the reality that these men on-screen are losing themselves to the chase. They’re allowing themselves to berate suspects in torturous interrogations. To use human beings as pawns in their compulsive pursuits—unwitting bait with the potential to be the next victim. And they think it’s okay because any collateral damage to their ends is justified.

Men therefore become monsters to capture other monsters, falling prey to the darkness of a world growing bleaker with each body found in the forest. Miklós Gurbán’s cinematography (one camera, long-take tracking and/or panning shots with zero crosscuts besides the aforementioned moment between Haumann and the professor) and the cast’s often excruciatingly slow delivery enhance this sinister sense of futility as though it’s all a nightmare with a final first-person shot depicting our unavoidable failure.

---

A scene from TWILIGHT; courtesy of Arbelos.