Critics reviews

While Sunset isn’t as grueling [as Son of Saul], it still demands that each corner of the frame be examined with the attention of an investigator. Sometimes the image will capture only a glimpse of what Írisz sees, while at other times, the soundtrack provides only clues to the violence and mayhem heard off-screen.

Nemes' suggestive, impressionistic approach takes some getting used to, but "Sunset" is worth the extra effort.

Sunset is hardly understated. Nemes has his share of baroque visual ideas—starting a scene behind a pane of frosted glass, exiting a dark interior into dazzling sunlight—but his great gift is for choreographed action.

That style applied to the endless horrors depicted in “Son of Saul” made it sometimes unbearable to watch, which was the point. Here, the technique is applied to an allegory of nearly suffocating self-seriousness, to much less powerful effect.

Nemes can be relentlessly opaque, which at time makes the film a drag to follow. But there's method in his determination to leave us with nowhere to park our own affinities. He's showing us the soil in which fascism takes root, and in this sense Sunsetoperates as a kind of prequel to the director's 1915 Son of Saul.

In short, Nemes caps a historical mystery with a 30-some-odd-minute blitz of hypnagogic symbolism, and as neither stretch succeeds on its own merits, Sunset simply feels like two films awkwardly affixed to one another.

Sunset is cinema at its astute and enchanting finest... Escaping into the past of 100 years ago brings us right here into the present, as firmly as only dreams, or ghosts, or fairy tales, or great cinema can do.

Propulsive energy and dread-tinged restraint provide a structuring tension that defines the film’s formal and textural composition.

Tremendous care has gone into period details (the costumes, in particular, are ravishing) that are only glimpsed in a blur. Nemes insists upon a meticulous physical recreation of the past—no digital backdrops or effects were used, and Sunset was shot on film—and at the same time refuses to let the audience bask in the pleasures of turn-of-the-century elegance.

László Nemes’s lavish, luxurious and completely ludicrous Sunset follows (with seasickness-inducing, long-take literalness) the nonsensically overwrought story of the dispossessed doyenne of a Hungarian hat-making empire...

Of course, Nemes wants to uncover the primal madness that such societal refinement conceals, yet with a running time clocking in at 142 minutes, the script spends spends far too much time coasting on ominous riddles.

In Sunset, Nemes’s filmmaking is as absorbing as it was in Son of Saul. Budapest at the beginning of the 20th century—where an orphaned young woman, Irisz, searches for her mysterious brother while working at an upscale hat emporium—presents its own kind of nightmare, made ominous and fantastical through Nemes’ claustrophobic framing, chiaroscuro look, and fluid camera movement.