Ferenc Grunwalsky uses a slow searching camera in a very different way than his contemporary Béla Tarr. His films offer the tense and claustrophobic world of human emotions-a harrowing place, as it happens. In The Goldberg Variations the parents of a teenage suicide try to understand, hours after the funeral, why their son died, and in the process must question whether they still have a life together. "Clearly inspired by the suicide of Grunwalsky's own daughter, but containing obvious parallels with the birth of the new Hungary (and its rudderless situation), the film has a slow-burning, mystical power leavened by typically Grunwalskian black humor." (Derek Elley, Variety/International Film Guide)