Post Mortem 2020

During the final months of World War I, a battlefield scene unfolds as Tomás is pulled from a mass grave by an older soldier, barely alive after an artillery blast. In the moment of semi-consciousness, he experiences a vivid vision of a girl who seems to call him back to life, a fragment of the beyond that will follow him home. This haunting glimpse foreshadows a gift and a danger, a way to bridge the living and the dead that will redefine him.

Six months later, he has become a peculiar photographer who offers grieving families a lasting memory of their dead by staging composite portraits where the living and the dead pose together in carefully rearranged tableaux. The sessions begin to blur the line between memory and reality, and it is during these eerie encounters that the vision seems to take on a form in the enigmatic presence of Anna, an orphan girl about ten years old who appears to embody the girl from his dreams.

At the invitation of villagers, he leaves the travelling caravan to reach [Anna]‘s Hungarian village, promising to return in a few days. There, the ground is frozen, making burials nearly impossible, a cruel consequence of the war and a devastating pandemic that has left so many bodies unburied. The photographer begins work under the wary gaze of the locals, taken in by the dedicated local teacher Marcsa. The atmosphere is heavy and paranoid, as residents insist there are more dead than alive and that the land is overrun by ghosts, a chorus of fear that seems to seep into every wall and doorway.

Tomás and Anna decide to push their investigations to the very edge of the beyond, even as dangers mount. The story paints a widening field of menace: barking dogs that never quite leave the night, muffled moans that drift from nowhere, malevolent shadows, walls that seem to ooze with unseen pressure, and invisible attacks that test their nerves and trust. There are still more duplicities and both small-scale and sweeping assaults, all framed as attempts to witness the presence of ghosts with the help of eerie tools—ropes, bells, flour scattered on the ground, torches, and relics like the photographic plate and the phonograph—each device turning into a clue or a trap in their frontier of the unknown.