This is a very beautiful film of delicate earthtones, all mud, rain, overcast skies and bare trees. Yet that aesthetic grace doesn’t lessen the ugliness of complicity in genocide...

| Oct 27, 2023

The war of Natural Light is one of inaction. The waits, the journeys, the distances that those who travel and survive, those who won't end in history books. [Full review in Spanish]

| Sep 15, 2022

Attempts to make us imagine the suffering of the executioners. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jun 2, 2022

It's a lot of unpleasantness to get to a message we've heard many times before, in a way that doesn't feel particularly fresh or exciting, even if it has some interest.

| Original Score: 5/10 | May 10, 2022

Writer-director Denes Nagy creates beautiful imagery in a cold, muddy place while exploring complexities of wartime interaction.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 18, 2021

There's a cold, sombre beauty to the compositions, which are rendered in varying shades of sludgy mud-brown.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 14, 2021

Nagy's skill at establishing tone is undeniable in Natural Light. However, an under-developed narrative, together with a refusal to vary its unremittingly dour atmosphere, means that the film fails to truly penetrate the moral cataclysms depicted.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 14, 2021

Comparable in both tone and content to Václav Marhoul's 2019 The Painted Bird in its study of war's corrosive effects on the human soul, Natural Light illuminates the fading glow of humanity amidst horror.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 13, 2021

Ripens slowly only to become stale.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 12, 2021

The film tells its damning war tale in a slow manner and with sparse dialogue.

| Original Score: B | Nov 11, 2021

The forceful imagery and acute sound design make Natural Light worth surrendering to, but a frail narrative may leave you feeling like you're in no man's land.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 11, 2021

This is a world of brutality and fear from which the movie averts its gaze at key moments, but the chill is unmistakable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 9, 2021

Brings the banality, tragedy and barbarity of war into stark relief.

| Nov 8, 2021

None of the film's committed opacity crescendos into any sort of clarity.

| Jun 6, 2021

A hardcore auteur film, intense, slow and deliberately paced.

| May 7, 2021

Despite its martial premise and seeming historical significance though, Natural Light will appeal far more to hardcore art film buffs than historians or war movie aficionados.

| Mar 26, 2021

Unlike many first-time directors who have the urge to cram more and more in, Nagy and his co-writer Pál Závada instead strip things back, letting the trudge of the men tell its own tale.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 25, 2021

So maybe Semetka has always had a conscience, but writer-director Dénes Nagy renders it useless as the character is never called upon to make a tough choice.

| Mar 17, 2021

Nagy's is a story of bleakness, a test of endurance, and a reminder that war is a hell that, atypically, refuses to rely on gratuitousness. And it ultimately, just about, earns that overbearing solemnity.

| Original Score: B | Mar 17, 2021

An impressive, confident debut that offers new ways to consider the casualty of war. If it receives endorsement from the Berlinale jury, we might also be looking at Hungary's submission for the Oscars next year.

| Mar 12, 2021