Critic Reviews

Like the best of dreams, familiar yet wondrously different, On Body and Soul adroitly mixes recognizable cinematic tropes with extraordinary ideas that are very much the filmmaker's own.

The film’s most considerable achievement, however, is to sustain its drama on a finely poised level of emotional intimacy, while sometimes hitting us with intense imagistic charges, not least the graphic slaughterhouse scenes at the start.

On Body and Soul seduces, distracts, intrigues, but ultimately doesn’t pack the visceral, spiritual impact that one might expect.

By placing vastly different people into a situation in which they find common ground, it highlights the tantalizing idea that the minutiae of day-to-day problems matters less than the prospects of escaping them through companionship.

On Body and Soul's fusion of romance, comedy, ultraviolence, and political commentary has the logic of a lucid dream.

On Body and Soul isn’t as linear in its storytelling style or as results-oriented in its plot as a Hollywood or Western European film wrestling with these themes might be. That’s why the foreign language Oscar category is so valuable. It insists that viewers at least take a shot at seeing the world through another culture’s eyes via challenging films.

Building her narrative around a pair of deadpan performances that yield dashes of humor amid a deep sentiment of human longing, Enyedi can sometimes revel too much in her depictions of modern solitude...without taking the theme much further. But she manages to introduce a few welcome surprises.

It’s to the credit of Borbély’s intelligent, melancholically understated performance that Maria remains sympathetic even as she becomes more of a condition than a character — and to the richness of the writer-director’s ideas that they move and intrigue even when they’re most artificially expounded.

While these are major hurdles to the film holding together as a consistent exploration of its subjects, On Body and Soul is still an intriguing, cerebral comeback for Enyedi.

There's a measured, almost clinical precision to how On Body and Soul is shot that, while in keeping with Mária's great fragility and terrible need for affection, prevents the film from really delivering.