Hungarian director Gábor Holtai makes his feature debut with Feels Like Home, a thriller – with elements of a chamber drama – about a kidnapped woman. The film recently enjoyed its world premiere in the Noves Visions section of the Sitges Film Festival, where it picked up the Méliès d’Argent for Best Fantastic Genre Feature (see the news), honoured by a jury from the Méliès International Festivals Federation as the best feature at Sitges. It is now showing at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.

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Written by Holtai and Attila Veres, Feels Like Home quickly swoops into this world through the life of Rita (Rozi Lovas), a recently unemployed woman who is kidnapped and told she is actually named Szilvi Árpád. She quickly discovers that the other “family members” – including one child – are all kidnapped loners, physically and emotionally forced to play a role at the behest of Papa (Tibor Szervét), with his dirty work carried out by Rita’s new brother Marci (Áron Molnár).

With more of a thriller than a horror feel, Feels Like Home follows Rita’s quest to escape at any cost, but her attempts are thwarted by Papa, her empathy towards her fellow siblings-cum-prisoners, and her slow metamorphosis into the part of Szilvi. Using techniques such as planting a camera to create an extreme bird’s-eye view of different rooms, the cinematography by Dániel Szőke cultivates a feeling of complete and utter confinement within Rita’s surroundings, inscribing each space with great detail. Lovas’s performance is brought out by close-ups that capture every bit of existential dread and each twitch in her face, allowing us to ponder her next scheme with glee even before she utters a word.

The evolution of the characters’ alliances and desires ensures the movie does not end up in a narrative loop, although its major turning point – roughly at an hour and 15 minutes in – could certainly have come sooner. The last 45 minutes, however, are a delight to watch, as Rita’s – or perhaps, now, Szilvi’s – agency develops, her goals change, and the bonds with the other family members tighten and loosen. With this, Feels Like Home escapes the pitfall of genre flicks with similar angles based in a single location: a lack of character development and a repetition of the same story beats.

Instead, through the script, Holtai and Veres do a very capable job of unravelling the basis behind the film’s eerie premise, based upon a slightly extended view of reality where bystanderism and complicity are stretched to an extreme. As Rita/Szilvi is permitted to exit the house for the first time, she discovers the extent to which her neighbours smile and nod, knowing what Papa is up to. With its seemingly innocuous “fantastic film” angle, Feels Like Home is still able to ask a very pertinent question: even when you know that horrors are sitting right before you, just how much are you willing to look away when you know you’ll be safe and sound if you do?

Feels Like Home is a Hungarian production by CineSuper and is sold by Celluloid Dreams.