‘Ground Floor’ Is a Political Parable Full of Apathy, Absurdity – and Mold (Exclusive Clip and Chat)

Franz Kafka and Don Quixote would feel right at home watching Ground Floor (Földszint), the new film from Hungarian auteur Gábor Reisz. But former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán would very likely not be amused. Back in 2023, Reisz’s Explanation for Everything, a dramatic look at the culture wars, won the best film award in Venice’s Horizons (Orizzonti) program. Now, he is back at the Venice Film Festival, this time in the Venice Spotlight section, with a sharp social and political satire. Ground Floor is a deep dive into a quixotic journey into an existential crisis that is full of absurdity, dark humor, political metaphors and mold – yes, mold! The film, world-premiering at Venice on Thursday, Sept. 10, stars Ádám Tompa (Blue Heron) as Kristóf, a failed artist who, on a single day on which he and his wife want to go on a lake holiday, learns that he will become a father and discovers strange black mold in their apartment. To the exasperation of his wife, the usually apathetic man is spurred into rare action to solve the mold issue. He doesn’t even really know the people in the building. Can he fix the mold emergency and change things for the better? Or, as a logline for Ground Floor puts it: “Which will break down faster – the building where Kristóf lives, or the apathy from which he awakens to find himself at the forefront of a tragicomic domestic revolution?”Rodrigo Crespo, Bettina Józsa, Tünde Bacskó, György Gazsó, Juli Kindl, Éva Tímár and Marcello Fonte also star in Ground Floor, which Reisz co-wrote with Éva Schulze (Explanation for Everything) and Zsófi Reisz-Varga. Kristóf Becsey handled the cinematography, while Reisz and Schulze edited the film with Dávid Jancsó and Ilka Janka Nagy. Films Boutique is handling sales. THR can exclusively premiere a clip from Ground Floor. Watch the scene that puts Kristóf on his unusual journey. Now that you have seen a first teaser for the film, here is how Reisz describes key inspirations and themes he wanted to explore, and his take on just how Hungarian Ground Floor is. Where did the idea to set the film in an apartment building that is threatened by mold and other issues, which is clearly a metaphor or a fable for the bigger world, come from? Reisz Actually, the basic idea came from my producer Júlia Berkes. She could imagine a movie which was set in a building residents’ meeting. Maybe you don’t know about residents’ meetings. It’s really specific to our [country]. Every Hungarian could easily relate because in every apartment building, you need to go to this meeting twice a year. And you can’t imagine how absurd this kind of meeting is because everything is about the apartment, the staircase, the cleaning stuff, how to spend money. So, usually there are a lot of arguments. When she told me about this idea, my answer was, “Okay, let’s go with this, and I will try to think about it.” It was 2024 when we talked about the story, and I felt that in Hungary, the [political] system and the atmosphere were in such bad shape that I could not think about anything else but how the building idea was connected to how it is living in Hungary. So, that was the starting point. And black mold is something that always sounds terrible to people because it’s really expensive to get rid of. You talked about the metaphorical part. From the very beginning, it was so clear that if we shoot something in an apartment building, it’s, of course, somehow about Hungary in a small version, in a microcosm. Can you tell me a bit more about the atmosphere in the country that you found so bad? Around the middle of the scriptwriting process, we realized with my co-writer Éva Schulze that the basic problem is the apathy of society. This is the main reason that I wanted to make this film to, a little bit, generate a revolution or something like this, even if it sounds naive. But I think the mission of every form of art, also of filmmaking, is to talk a little bit about the problems and somehow generate a change in society. It’s funny because I heard one year before Béla Tarr atar died that somebody asked him if he feels he changed anything with his amazing filmography, and he answered no, he didn’t think so – maybe just a little bit. How would you describe the tone of Ground Floor compared with Explanation for Everything? Our previous movie was a social drama, and maybe a few parts were a little bit funny. And with this movie, I found it was so dark that we felt we needed to get a little bit lighter. Of course, the Hungarian humor is a little dark. It’s maybe connected to English humor and Czech humor. With the government change in Hungary, are you feeling a bit more optimistic? I think I am a little bit optimistic. We actually changed the ending of the movie. The shooting started in March, and the election was on April 12. During the editing process, I always check with my co-writer. And we started to discuss the end because the original end was really dark. There wasn’t any sunrise. So the sunrise idea came later, from my optimistic part. It’s not too much because I’m not absolutely optimistic. I just have a tiny little hope. [The country], like the house is still in the same shape. So, you need to do a lot of work. Are you working on a new movie? With the political change in the election, there will be a new [film funding] system in Hungary. We haven’t had any public money for ages. If you know that you won’t have more than 200,000 euros ($233,000) for a film, then you cannot think high concept. But I hope that now we can start with a blank page and just write what we want to write.