THIS adaptation of James M.Cains' classic "The Postman Always Rings Twice" is set in the Hungary of the 1930s. György Fehèr's aim was to "make a film which is similar to the last salvaged print of a long lost film". The passions he investigates are centred around primeval fears and cravings and a sense of inescapable doom.

The garage-owning husband, his wife and his assistant all live under the same roof in a ménage-à-trois. From the outset there are tensions: the husband is terrified his intuition might be true, the drifter is terrified his boss might find out, the wife is terrified by their destructive jealousy. We know what is going to happen and it does. Wife and lover plot against husband. Yet, the first attempt at murdering him fails and the tensions increase.

Shot in powerful black and white and painfully slow-paced, the story takes its ineluctable turn. The passions of love give way to feelings of mutual hatred and fear as the protagonists are driven into an increasingly destructive dependence on each other.

"Passion" sucks you in deeper than you might wish. The epigraph to the film is taken from Revelations and leaves one with the feeling that even though hell is overcrowded, there is always room for us to squeeze in too.