Just because it focuses on the aimless existence of lowlife in a rainswept Hungarian coal town; and just because it's comprised of meticulously composed, exquisitely slow monochrome tracking shots, don't presume this is just another piece of Eastern European miserablism.
Director Béla Tarr and novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai are as dogged in their pursuit of the morose Karrer (Székely) as he is of his former mistress (Kerekes), a singer at the aptly-named Titanic Bar, whose shiftless husband Karrer betrays en route to his very own living hell of lust, guilt and solitude. But this is much more than a stark, moving metaphor for a tottering Communist world. It's also solid proof that cinema's unique potential for artistic expression still remains largely untapped.