This was another one of the seemingly promising films, and proved to be a disappointment. Where will you find a better environment for the creepy, uneasy horror of the Hungarian countryside immediately after the First World War and the world plagued by the Spanish flu. The main character is a German soldier Thomas who is thrown into a mass grave by the rival army at the very end of the war, and he is still alive and we understand that he was just unconscious and out of death as if he was pulled by the hallucination of a girl calling him. A few months later, Thomas is in Hungary and he is dealing with an extremely unusual and bizarre, even morbid type of photography. He photographs the dead in such a way that the family gathers a dead member of the family and then he puts make-up on it, arranges it and prepares it for the photo shoot so that people keep that photo as a memory of the dear deceased.
One day, the little girl he saw in the hallucination will indeed appear and ten-year-old Anna will invite him to her village where there should be a lot of work because half the people died from the Spanish woman. But very soon it will become clear to Thomas that some very strange things are happening in that village, because in every photo he will capture the outlines of ghosts along with the deceased. And it’s really amazing how an experienced director like Peter Bergendy who has already made films whose plot is set in some historical period, has managed to explode here. Unfortunately, there turned out to be a big difference in making a historical film and horror, and even though all the ingredients for one good movie stew were there, the head chef ruined them and put together some bland soup.
“Post Mortem” does not have the expected creepy atmosphere, and the special effects are really very bad, often beyond the limits of the funny. There is nothing better than acting, the film is unnecessarily stretched to two hours and a lot of it is repetitive, the story is quite confusing and it is a pity that “Post Mortema” was not reached by someone who understands horror. This left the damage of a great environment, quality scenery and production design and a truly brilliantly portrayed historical period immediately after the First World War and a typical Hungarian village from that time. This was a rather weak attempt at folk horror in the Hungarian way and it really always disappoints me when nominally not a good, but this time an extraordinary idea, ruined in this way. Rating 5/10.
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