Nimród Antal shuts people in and makes them sweat: a metro, a motel, a car, a jungle that turns out to be a cage. He builds tension carefully, and on the evidence we have, he is better at starting a film than at finishing one.
Fi1m perspective
The best thing in Predators (2010) is its first idea. Soldiers are dropped by parachute into a jungle, and it slowly dawns on them, and on us, that the jungle is not ours and the hunting is what it is for. For an hour Antal keeps the monsters out of sight and lets the strangers size each other up. Then he brings the hunters into daylight and lets them stand there, at length, and a film that had been about not knowing becomes a film about looking.
Locking a cast into one place is the whole career. Antal was born in Los Angeles to Hungarian parents, went to Hungary in 1991 to train, and made his debut, Kontroll (2003), in the Budapest metro, where it stayed. He came back to Los Angeles in 2005 and made Vacancy (2007), a horror film in a motel, and Armored (2009), before Robert Rodriguez hired him for Predators. Since then the work has scattered: a concert film, Metallica: Through the Never (2013); a Hungarian feature, The Whiskey Bandit (2017); Retribution (2023), which puts Liam Neeson in a car and keeps him there; and television, including episodes of Wayward Pines, Servant and the fourth run of Stranger Things.
What he does well is plain. Give him a corridor, a handful of character actors and a reason they cannot leave, and he will get more out of it than most. Gyula Pados, who has shot two of his films, is the collaborator to look for. We were properly tense for the first hour of Predators: strangers who might be the next to die, a river that had to be crossed, and nothing shown. We drifted in the last twenty minutes and were a little surprised how little we missed. The reason is the one our review gave at the time. John McTiernan hid his monster for most of Predator (1987); Antal has three and cannot stop looking at them. The instinct that makes his openings work, holding back, deserts him when the plot needs paying off.
Stranger Things is the odd one out, and telling. Our review of the series did not pick out any single director, and we will not pretend to. What it did say is that the later runs get bigger, and not always where it counts. Handing a director whose gift is for small rooms one of the largest programmes on television is the kind of decision that makes sense on paper.
He is not a director we would send a stranger to, but he is a reliable one, and reliability is rarer than it sounds. If you want the case for him, watch the first hour of Predators with the volume up. If you want the case against, keep watching.
Biography
Nimród E. Antal is a Hungarian-American film director, screenwriter and actor. Born in Los Angeles in 1973 to parents of Hungarian descent, he moved to Hungary in 1991 to study at the Hungarian Film Academy in Budapest. After graduating he worked in the Hungarian film and television industry before returning to Los Angeles in 2005.
He wrote and directed the Hungarian-language feature Kontroll (2003), which won the Award of the Youth at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and other prizes. His subsequent feature films include Vacancy (2007), Armored (2009), Predators (2010), Metallica: Through the Never (2013) and Retribution (2023). On television he has directed episodes of Wayward Pines (2015), Servant (2019–2023) and two episodes of Stranger Things season 4 (2022).
