14/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Bálint Dániel Sós delivers a brilliant first feature film, deftly pulling apart a tangled mess of secrets, lies and guilt with a wonderful mise en scène approach

Zsófi Szamosi, Szabolcs Hajdu, Ágoston Sáfrány and Eliza Sodró in Growing Down

"I hope that at a certain point we’ll understand what happened and why." What wouldn’t a father do to save his son? And it’s just such a Dostoyevsky-style spiral of conflicting feelings, hidden tensions and moral torments which forms the backdrop to Hungarian director Bálint Dániel Sós’ captivating and highly accomplished first feature film, Growing Down [+see also:
trailer
interview: Bálint Dániel Sós
film profile], which was unveiled in the 75th Berlinale’s Perspectives competition.

As it follows in the wake of a father trying to cover up a very serious act committed by his 12-year-old son, the film reveals a director gifted with an array of qualities, because it takes more than a honed and empathic story, as is the case here (thanks to a formidably sharp screenplay written by the director in league with Gergő V. Nagy), to create such a striking work; form also plays a crucial role, notably the filmmaker’s wonderful choice of black and white, director of photography Kristóf M. Deák’s finely wrought frames, and Márton Gothár’s chiselled editing.

"What have you done? Stay here and don’t say a word to anyone. It wasn’t you, ok?" A waking nightmare unfolds for Sanyi (Szabolcs Hajdu) and his youngest son Dénes (Ágoston Sáfrány) at a joint party celebrating the birthdays of this young man and Sári (Zonga Jakab-Aponyi), who’s the five-year-old daughter of Klára (Anna Háy), with whom Sanyi has been enjoying an almost adolescent idyll. In fact, the two singletons (the former a widower, the latter a divorcee) are now on the verge of moving in together. But an accident involving Dénes (no spoilers) takes place, and Sanyi finds himself brutally torn between two kinds of love (that of a son and that of a woman) and caught between truth and lie, with the sword of Damocles of a police investigation hanging over his head, given the potential for a child placed under significant pressure ("you need to do exactly what I say. Make sure you don’t say anything that might make people think it’s your fault") to say the wrong thing, and the possibility of events having been recorded by surveillance cameras…

"What can a father say?" Ingeniously, the entire plot of Growing Down revolves around this question, which is far wider than the straightforward (yet very deftly developed) twists and turns of the incident which drives the action, with all its attendant guilt ("it must be horrible to live with a secret like that"), adversity, destruction and subterfuge. In fact, the difficulties involved in education and communication and in transmitting values which are crucial to instinctive family ties and to looking at ourselves in the mirror, are all furtively explored in this film. And these themes are perfectly performed and cleverly interwoven in an intelligent combination (incredibly rich in variations) of an intimate quasi-thriller and a philosophical reflection on a moral dilemma, which is reminiscent, in its own way (and on a first film scale) of Cristian Mungiu’s movies. In short, Bálint Dániel Sós pulls off a wonderful feature film debut and we’ll be intrigued to see what comes next for this promising director who knows how to blend an intense audience experience with staggering artistic excellence.

Growing Down was produced by CineSuper, while Goodfellas is steering world sales.

(Translated from French)