10/07/2025 - Bence Fliegauf uses a pseudo-documentary form to trace how rumours of a folkloric demon evolve into a psychosocial phenomenon

Premiering in the Crystal Globe Competition of the 59th Karlovy Vary IFF, Jimmy Jaguar [+see also:
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film profile] is Hungarian auteur Bence Fliegauf’s latest foray into hybrid storytelling. Structured as a faux-documentary, the film examines how a fringe belief in a folkloric demon spreads through a series of loosely connected encounters, blurring the line between collective psychosis and constructed myth.

The film opens with footage of the interrogation of a young mechanic, Robert Kiss (Erik Major), who goes by the name Seed. He has been detained alongside a local eccentric, poet Marci Balfi (Krisztián Peer). The two men, who had never met before, were apprehended after assaulting a reclusive individual, binding him, placing him on a boat and setting him adrift on the Tisza River. A subsequent investigation revealed that their victim was a wanted Serbian war criminal who had been in hiding in the Hungarian woods. When questioned, Seed offers an implausible explanation: both he and Balfi were possessed by a demon named Jimmy Jaguar, referred to simply as Jagu, which compelled them to act.

Although Jimmy Jaguar could nominally be described as a possession story drawing on folk-horror elements, Fliegauf avoids conventional genre markers. Initially conceived as a series, the film comprises a string of encounters with individuals who claim to have been possessed by the elusive demon. It’s built like a Hungarian version of The Blair Witch Project, although its approach embraces the procedural elements of true crime. Combining investigative recordings, found footage and testimonial interviews, the movie assembles a patchwork narrative that traces a series of alleged possessions leading to the formation of a cult, with Balfi, resembling Charles Manson, as its head.

Yet Jagu functions less as a malevolent entity and more as a meme, one that draws in a disparate group of individuals, one of whom even claims to be pregnant with the demon’s child. The slow-burning plotline gradually shifts from investigating what Jagu is towards the planning of a second mission instigated by the demon that appears to orchestrate the exacting of revenge against institutional abuse.

The film moves fluidly between speculative fiction and observational realism, reflecting Fliegauf’s signature austere aesthetic, and drawing on elements of docufiction, ethnographic drama and psychological horror. Cinematographer Mátyás Gyuricza employs medium shots and ambient lighting, blending found footage with different types of documentary stylisation. Rather than a traditional horror story, the feature emerges as an inquiry into collective delusion, shifting the focus further into psychosocial territory.

While the minimalist storytelling sets the tone, the final act remains subdued. The film ends in a relatively unadorned, anti-climactic and straightforward manner. Acknowledged as a near no-budget production, Jimmy Jaguar centres on a single idea that feels stretched too thin. Ultimately, it functions more as an exercise in docufiction techniques and falls short of the layering found in Fliegauf’s earlier work Forest – I See You Everywhere [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], despite a similarly episodic structure and the merging of the banal with the strange.

Jimmy Jaguar was produced by Hungary’s FraktálFilm.