Hungarian writer-director Gábor Reisz garnered significant notice on the festival circuit for his third feature film, 2023’s Explanation for Everything. That film was a pointed comedy that explicitly engaged with the crisis in Hungarian politics reflected in the dominance of Viktor Orbán and his right-wing Fidesz party. It was about a young man named Abel (Adonyi-Walsh Gáspár) who is trying to navigate his future, caught between an Orbán-loving father (István Znamenák) and a smug left-leaning high school instructor (András Rusznák) who will be grading Abel’s baccalaureate. The typical struggle between populists who actually hold all the power, versus “elites” who are virtually powerless, plays out in familiar fashion, since Abel is an apolitical doofus willing to play both sides in order to secure his own success. Even though Reisz’s sympathy was clearly with the left-leaning characters, Explanation overshot the mark by some distance, lumbering into an unenlightening both-sidesism.
By contrast, Ground Floor is almost gleefully apolitical, perhaps suggesting the director actually identified with Explanation’s lunkheaded everydude. One can perhaps feel the weight of Orbán being lifted from Reisz, since the struggles of Ground Floor are so parochial they’re confined to a single apartment building. You have seen this film dozens of times before, and Reisz adds little to the basic template. An unassuming nebbish, Kristóf (Ádám Tompa, last seen playing the dad in Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron), is planning a weekend getaway with his wife Vera (Bettina Józsa), when things start going wrong. While looking for an umbrella, he drops his phone behind a kitchen cabinet. To retrieve it, Kristóf has to punch a hole in the back of the cabinet, and when he does, we see his shocked expression. Behind the cabinet, the wall is covered in black mold.
Incidentally, when Vera arrives home, she tells Kristóf that she has just come from the gynecologist. Surprise! We’re pregnant! And so the wacky comedy of errors that ensues becomes inseparable from Kristóf’s latent anxieties of becoming a father. At one point, one of the film’s antagonists, a resident named Posszauer (György Gazsó), teases Kristóf by saying, “You look like you cry sometimes. What kind of a man are you?” Alas, Orbán may be gone, but the social conservatism and gender conformity he embodied still remain, and so Ground Floor is a fairly standard proving ground for a nice guy under duress, a significantly less amusing, Hungarian version of After Hours that stays pretty much in one place.
When Kristóf goes to speak with the building manager, a shady huckster named Balász (Rodrigo Crespo), he is told that the mold isn’t a real problem, because he is busy trying to gain the necessary permissions to install an elevator. “Won’t that make your life easier?” he asks rhetorically, to which Kristóf non-rhetorically replies, “I live on the ground floor.” Kristóf goes from apartment to apartment trying to locate the source of a water leak, and you won’t be shocked to learn that each denizen is stranger than the next. Eventually, he meets Mariz (Éva Tímár), the “crazy old woman” Balász and Posszauer warned him about. She is a longtime tenant who is the lone holdout on signing away permission to cede space for the elevator, and when Kristóf finally hears her out, he realizes what we have known all along. Balász is a crook who is siphoning money away from the tenants for his own improvement projects, one of which is almost certainly the cause of the black mold.
Ground Floor is certainly watchable, but unlike Explanation for Everything, it lacks the cultural and political specificity that will permit it to travel. We have our own Kafkaesque labyrinths into bureaucratic abuse, and Reisz offers little in the way of original insights. It is no spoiler to reveal that Kristóf cracks the mystery, reassures Vera about their future, and the end credits roll over an actual sunrise. Long dark night of the soul, new day dawning, etc. As the Coen brothers said in Barton Fink, “whaddya need, a road map?”
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