Ground Floor

Kristóf Méhn is a painter turned bank archivist, living with his wife Vera in a ground-floor flat in a block of flats. Two things happen to him on a Friday: he notices a patch of mould on the wall, and Vera tells him she is pregnant. He decides to find out where the mould is coming from. One by one he questions neighbours he has never known, while his conflict sharpens with the smoothly agreeable building manager, who is trying to push a large lift-installation project through that afternoon's residents' meeting. As Kristóf gets stuck in the building's affairs, his suspicion grows: the house is sick. The film covers a few hours, from Friday afternoon to Saturday dawn. The choice of setting is the film's whole argument. A residents' meeting in a block of flats is where every mechanism of Hungarian public life plays out in miniature: the influence of whoever can talk, the trust that comes from not knowing, the formally democratic decision behind which the decision has already been made. Kristóf sets out to understand a stain and ends up understanding a system. That is what makes the film a tragicomedy rather than a satire: nobody in it is wicked, everyone is simply following their own logic. This is Gábor Reisz's fourth feature. After For Some Inexplicable Reason (2014) and Bad Poems (2018), it was Explanation for Everything (2023) that took him onto the international stage, winning the top prize in the Orizzonti section at Venice. With Ground Floor he returns to the same place — and to the same territory, the small, bearable absurdities of everyday Hungarian life. He wrote the screenplay with Éva Schulze, edited the film himself and worked on the music. Ádám Tompa plays the lead, alongside Bettina Józsa, Tünde Bacskó, Rodrigo Crespo, István Znamenák, György Gazsó, András Rusznák, Éva Tímár, Viktor Fülöp and Juli Kindl. The cast also includes Marcello Fonte, who won Best Actor at Cannes for Dogman — his presence follows from the Hungarian-Italian co-production, joined by Italian producer Andrea Romeo. Kristóf Becsey is the cinematographer; the lead producer, as on all of the director's films, is Júlia Berkes. The world premiere takes place in early September 2026 in the Venezia Spotlight section of the Venice Film Festival. The Hungarian premiere follows just one day later, in the official competition of CineFest in Miskolc, and the film opens in cinemas nationwide on 1 October.