Riley Wade
Toward the end of WWI, Tomás (Viktor Klem), a German soldier is fatally wounded and seemingly comes back from the dead. Now a post-mortem photographer working in Hungary as part of a traveling spectacle show at the height of the Spanish Flu, he is drawn to a young girl who looks identical to the one he saw in his time beyond death.
Thus begins a journey into the heart of a village struck by death, which in good time becomes a delightfully absurd spectacle of supernatural mania. It’s surely enough to knock you off your feet, even if it doesn’t quite stick the landing.
To say Post Mortem’s scares are bold is an understatement, this film takes the broad definition of the ghost story and runs with it, kicking and screaming down country lanes and through slamming doors, clattering into shelves of pots and pans as it goes, and that alone is admirable—scares are bombastic, rarely “scary,” so much as ghost-train startling, but such is part of the appeal. The special effects work here is remarkable, in one quietly spooky moment a dog seems to float, pushing against invisible walls as if trapped in a spectral box, while others toward the film’s absolutely bonkers ending see people quite literally torn into the air and flung. It is truly impressive, often ludicrous. Even when the execution of the scare doesn’t match the ambition, the sheer gall of some of these scares is so admirable. 
Ghosts here are not just “the dead” in the gothic sense, but a brutal and destructive force—‘Ghosts are real’ says Post Mortem. ‘What can you possibly do now?’ As such, a kind of pitch-black comedy rules the film, presenting a fairly ordinary, albeit thoroughly compelling gothic narrative to accompany its aggressive attitude to scares. It’d be fantastic if only the underlying story wasn’t so good. Beneath the bombast of Post Mortem’s bloodless grand-guignol is an intimate, quiet, and genuinely meaningful story of a village coping with death through meeting it head-on. It’s rote, sure, but one we so desperately need right now.
Director Péter Bergendy and writer Piros Zánkay build this through their wonderful manipulation of tone and space. The iciness of the Hungarian winter echoes in every crunching footstep, in the stark dreary gray scenery, while the quiet mourning of the villagers is a palpable undercurrent to the film’s most mundane moments. It’s a haunting shadow more emotionally impactful than any of the things that go bang in the night, though they may punctuate it. The gentle kindness of Klem’s Tomás—ever devoted to protecting this village of strangers—and Fruzsina Hais’ Anna’s eerie mischief are standouts, but the whole cast (even, and especially, the corpses) do a lot of heavy lifting to solidify this story with ambitions…ambitions that are viciously dashed in favor of spectacle.
This could so easily be a singular story with a narrative goal: a man faces his own death to help a town endure theirs. And yet, spectacle, frustratingly exciting ambition, seeps in.
But then I have to ask myself: if this were the film I was watching, would it be as wonderfully surprising? Would I be more satisfied smiling at a story well told, than at the unique and odd beast this was? The answer: why not both?
Post Mortem asks a single question: what happens when the afterlife overflows and when the dead are too numerous? The answers are twofold: subtle character work, gorgeous gothic mystery, or supernatural hell-on-Earth. And rather than let these ideas coexist in some kind of spectral soup, connecting naturally moment to moment, Post Mortem tries to have its cake and eat it too. The attitudes present don’t so much cohabit as force each other to make space, clumsily adjoining, never settled—a ghost subway car more than a train—and while that’s to the film’s detriment, it also generates a lot of its charm.
In the end, though, horror wins out, and Post Mortem ends up a little too eager to scare rather than intrigue, driving through a bloated midsection with moments of strange detective work to an ending rocketing with bizarre choices and stellar action. It’s a film borne down by two opposing ambitions, and the result is a half-baked, if unique and entertaining, mess. One wonders if it were given more time to fester in the soil, what new life could emerge beyond.
Post Mortem is featured as part of Grimmfest Easter 2022. A preview of the film can be found here.
