Vulture’s Wake

After the funeral of a mutual childhood friend, three men and their partners gather in an apart-ment-Andris with his wife Zsuzsa, Árpi with his girlfriend Niki, and Rajmund with his wife Csibi. Over  the years, the friends have grown socially apart: Andris is about to take up a position as a university professor in Mexico, Árpi leads a modest lower-middle-class life, and Rajmund is nearly at rock bottom, even selling his blood plasma to afford rent. The women tolerate their men’s conversations and musings for a while, but tensions gradually rise, and soon, everyone has had enough of each other.

The film Vulture’s Wake is the final installment of a relationship trilogy following It‘s Not the Time  of My Life and Kalman’s Day. Each film centers on middle-aged couples grappling with common yet seemingly insurmountable problems. This sense of helplessness fuels irritation, despair, and an over-all crisis in their relationships. In It‘s Not the Time of My Life, conflicts over child-rearing spark marital  tensions; in Kalman’s Day, the strain comes from a lack of intimacy and sexual fulfillment. Vulture’s Wake explores themes of identity, inherited behavioral patterns, masculinity, feminism, and modern gender roles. The men struggle to find their place, lost in the maze of traditional male identities, while  the women feel equally adrift in their own roles. Unable to navigate their frustrations constructively, they point fingers at each other, trading blame. In this society, every character hopes that a solution will come from-outside that change and progress will be initiated by someone else.