On Body and Soul (2017)

I really loved this Hungarian movie that is nominated for Best Foreign Language film.  I haven't seen a Hungarian film since I saw The Turin Horse, but if films demarcate a people and a culture, Hungary has a lot going on if you scratch the surface.
In this movie that is the dream world and the actual world.  It opens with a drop-dead gorgeous sequence superbly shot by cinematographer Máté Herbai. A magnificent stag and a self-possessed doe, alone in a stunning winter landscape of bare trees and snowy ground, stand together, their bodies touching in a palpable connection.

When we get to the real world, the film's main setting, a big-city slaughterhouse, looks mundane by comparison (although beautifully shot.  The cinematography is stunning throughout). And the cows, whose brutal end we are soon to witness, look at us with wary, pleading eyes, as if almost suspecting what is to come.

Looking over this with a dispassionate eye from his second-floor window is Endre (Géza Morcsányi), a lean, bearded individual with a withered arm. He is the slaughterhouse's director, the man in charge of the organized carnage.  Mária (Borbély) is the new government quality inspector, a preternaturally precise woman who turns out to have a fiendishly exact eye for both beef and the details of everyday life.  She has an autism spectrum disorder that makes her stand out in a way she would rather not.

There is a certain amount of attraction between these two, but both are introverted, even formal. Without any skill in small talk or socialization, nothing comes of this, with both Mária and Endre retreating to their individual dissociated lives. Until fate takes a hand.
The two are brought together by an investigating psychologist who routinely asks them about their dreams.  Which is how Mária and Endre discover that they are both having the identical dream every night, both sharing the exact same images of stag and doe that began the film and that recur periodically from here on in.The cadence and story are so unusual, and lovely in a way.