The Fifth Seal 1976

In December 1944, under the harsh glare of the Arrow Cross regime, four friends gather around the table of a bar owned by Ferenc Bencze Béla. A wounded photographer returning from the battlefront joins them, adding a sobering note to their already tense conversation. Their quiet evening is interrupted when two Arrow Cross officers drift in for a drink, and after they leave, the group bitterly call them murderers, a name that will haunt them as the night unfolds.

One of the friends, the watchmaker Lajos Őze who plays Miklós Gyuricza, poses a stark moral riddle to János Sándor Horváth: two hypothetical figures, Tomóceusz Katatiki and Gyugyu. Katatiki is the powerful but careless island leader who treats Gyugyu with brutal indifference, living by a barbary morality that leaves him unashamed. Gyugyu, living in misery, clings to the belief that any wrong done to him isn’t truly his fault and that his own soul remains guiltless with a clear conscience. The question looms large: if Gyugyu must die and be reincarnated as one of them, what would he choose?

The photographer speaks up, saying he would choose Gyugyu, a claim the others doubt. As the night ends and the friends drift toward their homes, the film peels back their facades and reveals hidden truths. Gyuricza’s flat becomes a sanctuary for Jewish children, a dangerous secret that could cost him everything. At the same time, László Márkus enters a spiral of drink and doubt, his mind tormented by the question Gyuricza posed, and his imagination flickers with troubling hallucinations.

The next evening, the same four men return to Béla’s bar, only to find themselves in a perilous trap. After being labeled as murderers by those who suspected them of talking, they are seized by Arrow Cross officers and dragged to a party office. There, an Arrow Cross official, deftly played by [Zoltán Latinovits](/actor zoltn-latinovits), forces them to perform a humiliating act: they must slap a dying partisan in the face in order to be released. Gyuricza is the only one to comply, a decision that scars him deeply and marks the night with a lasting brutality.

As Gyuricza steps out into the city after the ordeal, the world around him seems to erupt with violence and destruction—the buildings around him shudder and crumble, the sound of explosions distant yet inexorable, mirroring the moral collapse he has just endured. The film closes on a city that has shifted beneath the weight of fear and complicity, leaving the four men forever changed by that impossible choice and the brutal immediacy of power used to compel a confession of guilt or innocence.

• György Cserhalmi as Haldokló kommunista would be associated with the role, but the immediate focus remains on the moral questions raised by Miklós Gyuricza and the forces that pursue them.

• Lucy, Irén, and the rest of the band of friends are threaded through the narrative with their own hidden loyalties and the pressure of a world that demands quick, decisive, and often cruel judgments.

• The film uses a stark, almost parable-like framework to examine guilt, responsibility, and the lengths people will go to survive under an oppressive regime, while balancing intimate character studies with the pressures of a society in turmoil.