Ida regénye: A sweet, dusty trip to 1930s Budapest

Is it worth the time?

If you want to feel like you are sitting in a velvet-seated theater in 1934, yes. This movie is a total comfort watch. But if you get bored by formal manners and predictable romantic entanglements, you will probably be checking your phone after twenty minutes. It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel, just keep it spinning.

The whole premise of Ida regénye hinges on that classic 'marriage by accident' trope that shows up in things like Honeymooning. It’s all very polite and stuffy, which is half the fun. You spend most of the time waiting for the characters to finally realize what the audience figured out in the first reel.

Small details that caught my eye

There is this one scene where they are just standing around in a drawing-room, and the lighting is so harsh it looks like they are being interrogated. It’s charming in a way. You can tell they were trying so hard to get the shadows right, but sometimes it just looks like they’re standing in a spotlight at a high school play. It’s endearing.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Ida regénye (1934) through its definitive frames.

The costumes are incredible, even if the actors occasionally look like they are struggling to breathe in those stiff collars. I kept noticing the way the extras move in the background—half of them look like they are just waiting for the lunch break whistle to blow. It reminded me a bit of the frantic energy in Paris Interlude, where the background action feels like a separate, slightly chaotic movie entirely.

• The dialogue is snappy, but sometimes it feels like they are reading from a telegram.
• The house sets are clearly made of plywood, and you can almost hear them creak if you listen closely.
• The lead actress has this way of looking at the camera that feels very 'silent era' even though the sound is right there.

It’s not as dark as something like Crime and Punishment, obviously. It doesn’t want to be. It just wants to be a story about people making bad choices for the right reasons. There’s a scene near the middle that goes on about two minutes too long—just two people staring at a painting—and the silence starts to feel a bit awkward, but in a way that actually adds to the tension.

Maybe it’s just the nostalgia talking, but there is something about these old Hungarian films that feels more grounded than the big American studio stuff of the same year. It feels like someone actually made this for their neighbors, rather than for a global market. It’s far from perfect, but it’s got a heartbeat. 📽️