Juli Jakab in Sunset (Sony Pictures Classics)

If you are curious about what it would be like for an art film to be set in early 20th-century Budapest with a heroine possessing Terminator-like persistence, and often shot as though from a first-person shooter’s POV, then Sunset is definitely for you. It’s on odd, beautiful, immersive film that depicts Europe’s descent into World War I within a high-end hat shop. It’s a tall order, and even if it isn’t completely successful, it’s a pretty great film.

The Terminator in question is Irisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), who arrives unannounced at the Leiter hat store—a very, very upscale emporium with in-house design—looking for work. Her parents, who founded the store, died when she was two in a fire, and she was whisked away never to be heard from again, until this moment. She trained as a milliner (hat maker to the layman) and is determined to stay in the city where she was born.

At first, the current manager, Oskar Brill (Vlad Ivanov), sends her on her way. Eventually her determination wears him down and she becomes a fixture and a favorite in the store to the consternation of the floor manager, Zelma (Evelin Dobos). Soon enough, Irisz learns she has a brother who used to work at the store but was fired for committing a horrible crime. That’s all Irisz needs. She is now off tromping through Budapest and its environs, interacting with various classes and people, sundry and otherwise, shirking her responsibilities at the store yet still somehow getting promoted—to Zelma’s great consternation. Like a good noir mystery, the more Irisz digs, the rottener the state of Denmark is.

Writer/director László Nemes (of Son of Saul fame) rarely wavers in following Irisz’s point of view to the point where I would gather that half the shots are filmed from behind Irisz in extreme close-up with her neck as the most prominent feature of the frame. We are literally peeking over her shoulder as she barrels through the city. The extraordinary sound design fills in the blanks of what the camera won’t reveal and puts us even more into Irisz’s senses, but not her thoughts.

We are never sure what her motivations are, and Jakab, in a particularly impressive performance, only gives us so much. She is all jutting chin and piercing stare. Rarely does a moment of joy or mirth pass across her face, yet she is very much alive. Her face is like a frozen pond with hints of the life moving underneath it. You see bits of humor and surprise and revulsion flit by very subtly, but only if you’re looking hard enough. There’s a hint of Leone-era Clint Eastwood in her intransigence and bit of an intrepid reporter in her driven need to find the truth. We admire her, admonish her, and are intrigued by her. But with all the tricks that Nemes uses to place her sensory perceptions squarely into our cerebral cortex, we don’t identify or understand her. She is a cipher, a driver of action and ultimately a pawn.

What Nemes is not so subtly trying to do is position Leiter as a symbol of European decadence at the dawn of World War I. The royal family visits the millinery emporium, which is considered the height of elegance, but as the narrative scratches under the surface, its seamier elements come to light. It’s odd that the salesgirls who populate the store are all in their early twenties and live communally in a boarding house that Brill runs. There’s a violent coachman who attacks Irisz her first night there and who knows more than he lets on. In Nemes’s world, decadence trickles down.

This is a fascinating film with a few minor flaws and some narrative overstatements. The only big misstep comes with the final bravura tracking shot. It truly is a thing of beauty in terms of conception and execution, and any self-respecting film geek’s jaw will drop to the floor. But its sole purpose is to hammer home the already obvious metaphor that we know Nemes is getting at, making it irrelevant at the least and insulting to viewers’ intelligence at the most.

Sunset is 224 minutes long, and it does not deviate in its style in the least. Some will find this irritating, what with all the roving, hurtling camerawork and the disorienting sound design (this is one movie that should be seen in a theater for the audio alone). Some will find it over-stylized, a la Wes Anderson. But film is Nemes language and even though this only his second feature, he is masterful at the medium. For that alone, Sunset is essential viewing. Everything else, and there is a lot, is just the icing on the cake.