Hungary’s 2021 Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film may have an unwieldy title: Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time. But there’s nothing clunky about director Lili Horvát’s self-assured second feature that showcases an equally confident performance by Natasa Stork. The story of a cerebral leading lady pursuing a romantic mystery through moody Budapest exudes enigma, style, and brusque smarts.

Neurosurgeon Marta Vizy leaves a thriving practice in New Jersey to return to her native Hungary. A rendezvous on Budapest’s iconic Liberty Bridge with a Hungarian doctor she met and fell for at a conference has been planned to kick off her life’s new chapter. Here, Horvat stages a montage of Marta’s face as she waits in vain for her beloved, her eyes first alight with expectation but increasingly agitated as a whirling camera picks up passing tourists; it’s as though Hitchcock conspired with indie cinema to conjure up the perfect nightmare of being stood up. When Marta tracks down her quarry (Viktor Bodó), he stares at her and says they’ve never met before. Marta faints in the street.

I use the word “quarry” deliberately because Preparations turns into a game where Marta stalks the doctor and he, intrigued, in turn pursues her while questions accumulate. Marta has abandoned a coveted position Stateside to work in a crumbling, borderline-corrupt Budapest hospital, settle in a shabby apartment, and chase a man who claims not to know who she is. Is Marta sane? What are the male doctor’s motives? A callow young medical student makes moves on Marta. Where is he going to fit into her obsession?

This is the kind of movie where the journey matters more than the destination—we ditch any qualms and go along. Horvat has created a taut atmosphere in the Hungarian capital, 30 years free from Communism but still as conspiratorial and tightlipped as ever. Simply attired, struggling to control emotions under a cool exterior, Stork makes a fascinating noirish heroine with fleeting resemblances to Nina Hoss, Lili Taylor, and even Lauren Bacall.

Sophisticated touches like a warm flourish of classical music or a chaste but somehow kinky city walk enjoyed by the two doctors let some air into a film that could verge on claustrophobic. And the camerawork strikes a fine balance between Mitteleuropean elegance and textured decay—there’s that Hitchcock-meets-grunge thing again. Watch Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time and prepare for a bracing, intelligent 95 minutes.