‘Hukkle’: The Experimental Hungarian Movie About a Man With Hiccups

Far Out Magazine ^ | Tue 23 January 2024 | Scott Campbell

[nickcarraway]

Experimental cinema regularly throws up offbeat delights that have a great deal more going on under the surface than it appears at first glance, with writer and director György Pálfi stoking the flames of discussion and debate when Hukkle hit the festival circuit in 2022.

Made on a minimal budget, running for just 78 minutes, and using almost no dialogue, the broadest way to describe the film is that it unfolds in a small rural community in the filmmaker’s native Hungary, with an old man suffering from a bad bout of hiccups serving as the catalyst for the story.

What unfolds is a string of loosely connected vignettes that introduces a shepherd, detours underground to follow the animal residents who dwell below, a horse and cart filled with milk cans, an old woman feeding a mole she just killed to her dog, a fighter plane, and various other instances of what seems to be heightened mundanity. However, as the narrative gradually progresses, Hukkle very slowly places its cards on the table to hint that it might really be a murder mystery with a conspiracy at its core.

Trying to quantify Hukkle was made intentionally difficult by its creator, but as Pálfi would tell IndieWire, “I wanted to make a musical without music”. Drawn from his own research, once he’d cracked the setting and audio-visual aesthetic, he settled on parachuting a murder into the mix “after having seen that every community had some secret,” which in turn caused him to choose “the biggest one”. And yet, that still doesn’t come close to cracking the enigma of what it is or what it’s really about.

Part naturalistic drama, part whodunnit, part surrealist comedy, part investigative thriller, Hukkle also drew its inspirations from Trompe-l’œil, optical illusions that depict different objects in a different manner depending on how, where, and which way you look at them. It’s an approach that’s been applied to cinema numerous times, but never in quite such a superficially humdrum manner.

Living up to its inspiration, Hukkle is structured as a puzzle, leaving the audience to untangle its multitude of threads at their own convenience. Pálfi described it as “an experimental film that respects the audience”, suggesting that “the film is a game too”. That being said, he batted back against accusations it was too quirky for its own good, suggesting “this is not a weird film for me” but rather one which intentionally “uses a different storytelling system”.

A hundred people could watch Hukkle and interpret it 99 different ways, which is exactly what Pálfi was trying to achieve. On the surface, it’s an art film about a small and isolated community going about their daily routines with a hiccup-riddled elderly gentleman serving as the starting point, but beneath the surface, there are countless subtle and borderline imperceptible nuances waiting to be discovered.

[dfwgator]

[ComputerGuy]

At least they don’t have to use subtitles for the hiccups. They are self-translating.