A switchman at a sea port, witnesses a murder from his watch tower. He had reached a point in life where he was content to embrace loneliness while turning a blind eye to the inevitable decay that surrounds him. Upon bearing witness the murder, however, the he is forced to wrestle with such profound issues as punishment, mortality, and the sin of complicity in a crime he didn't even commit.
As with Tarr's other films the long held shots, slow tracking, long observant vistas unfold gracefully before the eye. The environment is claustrophobic and the mood sombre and menacing. Curiously, though, the film was made in Hungarian and then dubbed into an odd mixture of French and English. Quite why an English Police Inspector would be investigating a murder on French soil is not explained. This dual language aspect gives the film a surreal quality that is a departure from his previous starkly realistic films. Well worth watching, especially the very long sequence involving the murder itself, where the camera swings slowly from one side of the docked vessel to the other like a pendulum clock as events unfold on both sides of the vessel unaware of each other.
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