Kontroll

Cult fanciers, your ship has come in via a Hungarian-made hip machine filled with the kind of lost souls you wish you were cool enough to hang with. Chief amongst them is Bulcsu, the most distressed of a group of "controllers" who keep freeloaders from riding Budapest's subway trains. That's saying quite a bit, as his colleagues are the sort of angry, bitter, narcoleptic folk who wear cyberpunk shabby-chic and could only resort to spending working hours underground dealing with verbal abuse and lame excuses. But though Bulcsu refuses to acknowledge the world aboveground, there are bigger fish to fry, including a rival gang of controllers, a comely lass in a bear costume and the mysterious phantom figure who likes to push riders to their doom. This is mostly elegant bull, including some very obvious dark/light imagery and liberal borrowings from Blade Runner, Repo Man and The Warriors, but it's so stylishly shot and so seamlessly put together that you're not likely to care about the lineage. Not only does director Nimrod Antal get maximum mileage out of his astounding access to the Budapest subway system, but the wardrobe department follows through with some nicely designed costumes that will have you ransacking your thrift stores for their equivalents. It's not much more than the standard celebration of weird people in a shit job, but it's so representative of the hipster situation that the story can be told again and again without getting stale. And though the techno tracks by Neo get to be a bit much (clearly piggybacking on the synth score for Runner), the deathless cool of the demimonde and the romance of odd folks in desperate circumstances carries the day in this darkly frivolous late-night sleeper. (Th!nk)