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5.4/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 5.4/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. A léleklátó sugár remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
Hungarian cinema between the failed revolution and the Prague Spring has always felt like a reel soaked in river-water: images swell, colours bruise, and narrative logic warps until only atmosphere remains. A léleklátó sugár—literally “the soul-viewing ray”—is the country’s last science-fiction venture before the long hiatus that ended with Az Idő Ablakaj in 1969, and it behaves less like a movie than like a séance conducted inside a projector. Shot in late-1966 on salvaged Soviet stock, the film vanished from distributors after two Budapest matinees, resurfacing only in a 2019 4K restoration struck from the sole surviving print. What re-emerged is a 76-minute panic attack about memory theft, authoritarian arrogance and the thin mercury line between scientific breakthrough and metaphysical larceny.
There is no hero’s journey, only a courier who delivers his own obsolescence. The unnamed youth—played by Gyula Fehér with the brittle stoicism of someone who already suspects he is an extra in his own life—transports a contraption that looks suspiciously like a World-War-I field telephone cross-bred with a crown of thorns. Once Professor Varga (István Lázár, channeling both Rotwang and Rasputin) clamps the device to his pate, the story folds inward: every pilfered recollection becomes a floor-tile in the professor’s private palace, while the boy’s emptied skull echoes like a cathedral. Editors Éva Szentmárton and János Böde splice scenes so that actions finish in locations we have not yet seen, creating a temporal stutter which forces the viewer to inhabit the same disorientation as the inmates.
Director István Lázár, better known for rural pastorals, here weaponises industrial decay. The laboratory set—built inside the abandoned Ganz-Mávag turbine hall—oozes steampunk dread long before the term existed. Pipes exhale ochre steam, galvanometers twitch like anxious insects, and a constant drizzle of soot drifts through high windows, turning every close-up into a charcoal smear. Cinematographer Gusztáv Turán shoots faces through begrimed glass so cheekbones appear to hover independent of bodies, an effect that makes even tender glances feel post-mortem. When the helmet’s cathodes ignite, the frame erupts into solarised amber—an in-camera trick achieved by flashing the negative with sudden overexposure—so that memory itself seems to combust.
The sparse dialogue—perhaps nine minutes in total—floats atop a musique-concrète tapestry: turbine sighs, asylum keys clanging, metronomes amplified until they resemble heartbeats. Composer Rezső Seress, whose Gloomy Sunday supposedly drove Hungarians to suicide, contributes a single looping piano motif that descends by semitones until it dissolves into tape hiss. The effect is not merely unsettling; it is epidermal, a sound you feel under your fingernails. When Varga finally screams, the audio drops to absolute silence—an inversion of the Unforseen’s barrage, teaching us that horror can be the absence of all echo.
As the asylum’s resident visionary, Annie Góth slinks through corridors wrapped in gauze like a relic impatient for sainthood. Her eyes—inkwells of perpetual twilight—convey knowledge too heavy for language. In the film’s centrepiece monologue, delivered to a hydrotherapy tub full of floating photographs, she murmurs, “We are all projections on the wall of a mind that has already died.” The line ricochets through the rest of the narrative, undercutting every scientific certainty Varga professes. Góth’s performance is less acting than weather; she enters a room and the temperature drops.
Post-war Hungarian art rarely confronted imperialism head-on; instead it smuggled critique through allegory. Here, Varga’s appropriation of recollections operates like colonial plunder: he exports experiences the way the Habsburgs once carted corn and gold. The stolen memories—rendered as hand-tinted slides—are re-broadcast on a classroom wall to schoolchildren who applaud each fabricated heroism. Lázár quietly equates intellectual theft with state propaganda, suggesting that nations rewrite private histories until citizens mistake curated myth for organic truth. In 2024, amid data-mining scandals, the metaphor feels prophetic.
Science-fiction often codes technology as masculine and nature as feminine, but A léleklátó sugár scrambles that binary. The helmet’s wiring resembles Medusa’s locks; when bolted to Varga’s head it births not enlightenment but hysteria—historically labelled a female malady. Meanwhile Góth’s character wields clairvoyance, a form of knowledge coded intuitive and therefore “feminine,” yet she is the only figure who grasps the apparatus’s ethical stakes. Thus the film enacts a gendered inversion: rationalist man collapses into shrieking infant, while intuitive woman stands as repository of civic conscience.
Cinephiles will detect the DNA of The Blood of His Fathers’ intergenerational guilt, though Lázár replaces family curses with neurological vampirism. The asylum sequences recall the expressionist corridors of Syndens Datter, yet whereas the Danish film externalises sin through shadowplay, Lázár traps sin inside skulls and makes it fight its way out. There is also a spectral link to De Voortrekkers: both pictures mythologise national origin stories, only here the myth is privatised, a possession stripped from citizens by a technocrat.
Made during the brief cultural thaw under Kádár, the film critiques both fascist hero-worship and Communist revisionism without naming either. Varga’s newsreel montage—where he inserts his face into 1919, 1944 and 1956 street footage—mirrors how successive regimes spliced inconvenient bodies out of official history. The asylum stands for any institution that promises care while practising confinement: church, party, or psychiatric ward. By staging the climax inside a crumbling cinema, Lázár suggests that nations, like audiences, are held hostage by whatever flickers on their screen.
The film’s core provocation is ontological: if every recollection that buttresses identity can be repossessed, does the individual simply evaporate? The courier’s gradual erasure—his reflection fading from mirrors, his name reduced to an intake number—argues that memory is not merely data but the glue of Being. Yet Góth’s clairvoyant insists that some kernel of self persists anterior to language, anterior to image, like a candle you can’t see but which keeps casting shadows. The tension between these positions remains deliciously unresolved, turning the closing shot into a philosophical void where viewers must graffiti their own answer.
The 2019 restoration, overseen by the Hungarian National Film Archive, unearthed two excised minutes: a stroboscopic seizure sequence that censors had deemed epileptogenic. Now sutured back, the scene shows Varga’s pupils dilating into twin keyholes while projected memories strobe at 12 fps, inducing a meta-flash that threatens to bleed into the viewer’s optic nerve. The 2K transfer also reveals granular detail previously lost: scabbed rust on the helmet, salt-stains on asylum linens, and a micro-expression of pity that flickers across Góth’s face for exactly four frames—an eternity in a film obsessed with ephemerality.
Gyula Fehér’s minimalist descent is a masterclass in negative space; he acts the deletion of self so convincingly that by the final reel his silence howls. Opposite him, István Lázár (pulling double duty behind and before the camera) plays Varga as a man who mistakes omniscience for omnipotence, his baritone gloating until it shatters into a child’s falsetto. Annie Góth, meanwhile, modulates between detachment and raw compassion, achieving what few performers manage: she seems to listen to the film itself, reacting to off-screen metaphysics rather than co-stars.
At 76 minutes, the narrative feels both glacial and breathless. Lázár elongates mundane actions—steam billowing, locks turning—to the point of abstraction, then compresses pivotal exposition into single jump-cuts. The effect is similar to watching a glacier calve: eons of stasis, then catastrophic rupture. Contemporary viewers accustomed to the propulsive edits of Money Magic may initially squirm, yet the film teaches a radical form of spectatorship: lean in, and stillness becomes vortex.
Though predominantly monochrome, the print occasionally blooms into colour at moments of cognitive rupture. The helmet’s electrodes glow arterial red, suggesting both lifeblood and wound. Asylum gowns appear uric yellow, the same shade used in 1957 for state-issued blankets. Finally, the Danube’s projected reflection shifts to sea blue, evoking the flag flown by Hungarian exiles who fled after the failed uprising. Thus the film’s limited palette becomes a covert tri-colour, mourning a nation that exists only in diasporic memory.
Though virtually unseen abroad, the picture’s DNA propagated sideways: the asylum’s checkerboard floor resurfaces in Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, while the helmet’s ribbed design haunts the interrogation chairs of Švankmajer’s short Dimensions of Dialogue. Even western works carry its chromosomal trace: the memory-recall chairs in Minority Report employ the same claustrophobic top-shot that Lázár pioneered. Influence without recognition is the fate of many censored masterpieces; each new viewer rectifies a historical blind spot.
Great cinema does not merely depict life; it re-calibrates your pupils. A léleklátó sugár is great cinema, albeit buried under decades of political rubble. It foretells data harvesting, deepfakes, and the weaponisation of nostalgia with eerie precision, yet never feels didactic because its primary agenda is poetic: to make visible the negative space where identity evaporates. Watch it on the largest screen possible, preferably at 2 a.m., and when the final frame freezes, listen for the echo of your own memories—because by then you will no longer be certain whom they belong to.
IMDb 6.1
1926
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