Welcome to my 2026 project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.
Today’s feature is from the year 2003, we are headed to Hungary to hang around the subway in
Movie: Kontroll [Control]
Year: 2003
Director: Nimród Antal
Country: Hungary
The Elevator Pitch: Bulcsú works as a ticket inspector in the Budapest underground where he looks into a rash of suicides that might have actually been caused by a serial killer pushing people on to the subway tracks.
How Was the Movie?:
This was a really interesting movie which is perfectly placed in 2003. It contains EDM, an underground rave, absolutely no cell phones, Guy Richie-style editing, a manic pixie dream girl, and all the black leather a movie down wind of The Matrix could want.
Bulcsú himself is a detached indifferent fellow whose rag tag team of ticket checkers are a colorful set of characters who run the subway system they ramble around which acts both as a system transporting people around the city but also as a liminal space for our characters to haunt. Bulcsú never goes home, simply drifting from one side of the station to the other at night, eating food from machines, getting his entertainment from racing along the rails in a bid to outrun other workers and the train, and exploring further into the depths of the dark abyss of the underground nowhere.
During the course of the film it’s probably best to not apply too much reality to the film since it lives inside of a bunch of strange and illogical inconsistencies but to put it plainly: everyone seems like be living in a nightmare and society has broken down. In the middle of the movie there is a montage of each of the subsequent ticket checkers going into a psychiatrists office to be able to air their complaints and get some mental relief but it is instead almost three full minutes of people having breakdowns in various way. I find the sequence difficult to forget.
The movie lives in the wake of Snatch and other heist movies but in place of a diamond or a big wad of cash the thing that our protagonists are chasing are people who don’t have a tickets on the subway making every altercation more absurd than the last when you realize people are fighting, spitting, screaming, and harming each other what amounts to a pittance.
The main crux of the movie is about a mysterious person who might be pushing people on to the track but to me, it’s completely sent into the background by all the oppressive energy in the station, the erratic behavior of every person around Bulcsú, and the feeling of the world being off kilter all of the time. While it’s easy to say this is an allegory for hell I actually think the film is more easily read as an allegory for how hard life is and the tools and relationships we need to survive it.
I would recommend this if you don’t mind a little blood, vomit, violence, and something verging on horror. I’m not sure I fully understand the film but I definitely got the vibes.
What was for Dinner?:
For dinner I made Paprikás Csirke also known as, chicken paprikash. I made mine with vegetables stewed with the chicken and nokedli, which is basically the Hungarian version of spätzle / egg noodle on the side. I usually make the “Austrian style” of paprikash which is a long simmering stew with a lot of tomato but this version was very quick and has literally no tomato in it. I’m not sure I would say one is better than the other but if you’re in a rush this was delicious and super simple.
I don’t have a ton of notes about this because it was just really good and I will probably make it again. Traditionally it seems to be made with bone-in chicken but my husband really hates that so I made it with de-boned chicken thighs and I don’t think anything was harmed by it. I added zucchini, onions, potatoes, carrots, and red peppers right in to the pan which probably also isn’t traditional but I loved it. They boiled down into the sauce and were perfectly tender by the time the chicken was done.
10/10 will be making it again.
That’s it for 2003, see you in the future year of 2004!