Capsule review: Explanation for Everything

Explanation for Everything (dir. Gábor Reisz, 2023)

Seen at New Directors/New Films

Magyarázat mindenre, the original title for Explanation for Everything, an electrifying film by Gábor Reisz that just premiered at New Directors/New Films, is a pun on its country’s identity (Magyar means Hungarian). The title can’t be perfectly translated, and some of the intricacies of the country’s politics may be new to American viewers. But the gist of the conflict at the film’s core is all too relatable. The country is torn by the rise of right wing extremists who express their intolerance as “nationalism,” and who clamp down on the free exchange of ideas (including the free press), in the name of “freedom.” When the struggling high school senior Abel fails his oral history exam, he accuses his left-leaning teacher of targeting him because Abel was wearing a nationalist pin (the equivalent of displaying a flag in MAGA America). The lie sparks a national media uproar, wreaking havoc on the families of the boy and the teacher.

This is a zeitgeist movie, about how our daily lives and closest relationships are strained under the clouds of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump and their polarizing followers. Yet the great achievement of Explanation for Everything is that its depiction of the political firestorm is cleaved to several interwoven family and relationship dramas, all filmed with the intimacy and spontaneity of cinéma vérité but with razor-sharp writing worthy of Maren Ade. There are great performances throughout, and an escalating confrontation between Abel’s teacher and his father is one of the most scintillating scenes in recent memory. But the real heart of the movie is the father-son relationship, and Gáspár Adonyi-Walsh as the tormented son and István Znamenák as the overbearing father are so good that it is truly painful to watch them interact. Abel is paralyzed (and rendered mute at times) by his father’s oppressive conservatism. I don’t want to spoil the ending, which is both exhilarating and haunting; I’ll just say that it takes place at the shore, evoking The 400 Blows, and that Explanation for Everything joins Truffaut’s landmark coming-of-age film as another great movie about the difficulties of growing up in a world controlled by screwed-up adults.