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Movies & TV

10th Feb 2018

One of this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar nominees has just been added to Netflix

Rory Cashin

You get to check it out at home before the awards ceremony on Sunday 4 March.

While none of Netflix’s big-hitters – The Meyerowitz Stories, Okja, Mudbound, etc. – managed to get too much traction at this year’s Oscars, one of their productions did manage to bag a Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar nomination.

In among the five shortlisted movies, including A Fantastic Woman (Chile), The Insult (Lebanon), Loveless (Russia) and The Square (Sweden), was Hungary’s entry, Of Body And Soul.

The film had already picked up the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, and has a score of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.

A peculiar drama involving a man and a woman who work together in a slaughterhouse, and they have the same dream every night, in which they meet as deer in the forest.

They soon realise this during an investigation when a psychologist interrogates everybody at the company where they work, and they try to figure out what this weird coincidence could possibly mean.

Clip via Netflix

If you’re still unsure, here are just some of the reviews:

“Like the best of dreams, familiar yet wondrously different, On Body and Soul adroitly mixes recognisable cinematic tropes with extraordinary ideas that are very much the filmmaker’s own.” – Los Angeles Times

“The film’s most considerable achievement, however, is to sustain its drama on a finely poised level of emotional intimacy, while sometimes hitting us with intense imagistic charges, not least the graphic slaughterhouse scenes at the start.” – Screen International

“On Body and Soul is a glorious story of two minds striving to connect, and of the difficulty in finding someone with whom to share your dreams, even if you’re literally doing just that.” – Metro

“By placing vastly different people into a situation in which they find common ground, it highlights the tantalizing idea that the minutiae of day-to-day problems matters less than the prospects of escaping them through companionship.” – Indiewire

“On Body and Soul’s fusion of romance, comedy, ultraviolence, and political commentary has the logic of a lucid dream.” – Slant

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