Honeymoon

A picture-perfect wedding in the Czech countryside takes an unwelcome turn when a black-clad figure crashes the celebrations, eclipsing the new couple's happiness like a shadow over the sun. This mysterious outsider claims to be an old friend of the groom, but arrives bearing a gift that threatens to mar the festivities. The third chapter in a loosely constituted trilogy about suppressed guilt and secrets (also including 2009's Kawasaki's Rose and 2011's Innocence), Jan Hrebejk's latest film is a wonderfully fraught meditation on the (im)possibility of forgiveness.

Honeymoon takes place over the course of a happy afternoon, a restless night, and the harrowing morning after. The groom's professed ignorance of the newcomer's identity is the first suggestion that the mood is about to sour. After mingling with the invited guests and winning their children's affections, the enigmatic stranger enters the bride's inner circle and reveals the purpose of his untimely — or perhaps perfectly timed — visit. Within the space of a few hours, he progresses from interloper to confidant, but his disclosures threaten to drive a wedge between the newlyweds. Have they been too eager to ignore past mistakes, one another's as well as their own?

Hrebejk orchestrates the subsequent developments with virtuosic assurance, while, in a series of sustained intimate exchanges, veteran performers Ana Geislerová and Stanislav Majer inhabit their baggage-laden characters as they begin, belatedly, to see through one another's facades. At once delicate and forceful, Honeymoon is an elegant exploration of morality and conscience, played out against a pastoral backdrop that betrays few hints of the provocative questions at the film's core.

DIMITRI EIPIDES