This is a love story and a ghost story. The year is 1934 and the Held family have moved from the countryside to an elegant house on Katalin Street in Budapest. Their new neighbours are the Major (with whom Mr Held fought in the Great War) and his mistress Mrs Temes, upright headteacher Mr Elekes and his slovenly and unconventional wife Mrs Elekes.

Ferenc Török is firmly aiming at the festival and art house circuit with his slow-paced recreation of one summer day in rural Hungary. A steam train stops at a rural siding, two Orthodox Jewish men descend and with minimal speech, oversee the unloading of two boxes onto a horse drawn cart and start their long walk into town.

There seems no limit to the sheer creativity that fizzes from Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. For their second night at the Proms, packed out this time, the theme was the meeting of classical and Gypsy musical traditions.

Two heartening facts first. Iván Fischer's much-loved crew remains one of the few world-class orchestras with an individual voice, centred on lean, athletic strings adaptable to Fischer's febrile focus (perfect for Enescu and Bartók, not quite so much for Mahler).

There’s a terrific drive to Kornél Mundruczó’s Jupiter’s Moon, a cinematic powerhouse of both technique and ideas. The maverick Hungarian director’s film, which premiered in last year’s Cannes competition, may occasionally bewilder – such is the spectrum of subjects upon which it touches – but rarely fails to impress.

The energy of its opening takes us right into the frantic disorder of Europe’s refugee crisis, as an attempted border crossing – a rush from a crowded lorry onto boats – is intercepted by troops. A single figure flees, only to be felled by gunfire, before rising into the sky in a whirl of levitation: in a moment Mundruczó has stepped away from realism into its magical variety. His young hero is Aryan (Zsombor Jéger, doleful, soulful), a Syrian refugee separated in the confusion from his father, whose bewildered negotiation of the new world that he has entered, one that will prove far from kind, provides the film’s sometimes surreal journey.

The youth’s new ability has not passed unnoticed. He’s pursued by the same security forces that failed to apprehend him, while falling into the care of refugee camp doctor Stern (played by Merab Ninidze, the Georgian actor last seen in the BBC’s McMafia, as pale as ever, pictured below with Jéger). The latter, with his own murky associations and a past to expiate, becomes something of a father-figure, though his motives – to hawk these miraculous talents around ailing patients, refreshing them with some new, transcendent wonder – are initially mercenary. But a closer bond gradually establishes itself between these two lost souls, despite the hesitant English that is their only means of communication (it’s a somewhat "Europudding" combination not enhanced by some haphazard doubling).Mundruczó and his co-writer Kata Wéber dial up the mystical element as the levitation scenes – they may not have quite the same angelic connotations as Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, but they’re not far off, either – bring religion into the equation, with Aryan (son of a carpenter, no less) pitched as a contemporary Christ figure. The world he has possibly come to redeem is sorely in need of said treatment, including a presentation of contemporary Hungary’s political extremism (as incisive as it was in Mundruczó’s previous film, the canine-themed White God), plus a plot cross-strand (ultimately rather extraneous) involving terrorism.

Technically it’s all extremely accomplished, from the levitation elements – what a long way a little CGI can go – to a terrific single-take car chase through the streets of Budapest, and a shape-shifting interior scene that surely riffs on Christoper Nolan’s Inception, all the product of outstanding cinematography from Marcell Rév. But all such invention on big visual elements would be nothing if the director didn’t convey the micro-mood of his world so well: its theme colour is a sickly nocturnal yellow, Mundruczó’s characters pallid and clearly still dealing with the traumas of the 20th century as well as the issues that the new one has brought. It’s a potent and somehow very European cocktail – the title’s allusion is to a planetary moon, apparently a cradle of possible new life forms, that is named after our continent – from a director who is never afraid to set his sights as high as his characters fly.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Jupiter's Moons

Seventy years old and still imbued with youthful flair and enthusiasm – that’s the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, which pioneered new territory in its first concert of 2018 last night. The flair and enthusiasm also apply to Sir Mark Elder, who conducted the event. He and the NYO, with help from Chris Riddell (former Children’s Laureate, creator of Goth Girl) and director Daisy Evans and her team, gave the first complete opera performance of the organisation’s history with Bartók's Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (Testrol es lelekrol) opens on a scene of cold. It’s beautiful, a winter forest landscape, deserted except for two deer: a huge stag and a small doe react to one another in the snow, a tentative interaction of eyes and noses, nothing more. There’s a tenderness to what we see, the vulnerability of the female set against the power of the antlered male, but also a sense of somehow icy withdrawal.

Enyedi is too subtle a director to treat this opening scene as a metaphor for what follows, the human dimension of her film, although its story is indeed of the tentative interactions between a man and a woman. And that sense of cold continues. Our feeling of withdrawal increases as her second scene proceeds: its setting is a slaughterhouse, cattle waiting, penned but not frightened – their eyes, again, enormously expressive. Then they are stunned with shocks of electricity, and the process of dismemberment begins: carcasses reduced to slabs of meat before our eyes, all accomplished mechanically, human involvement limited to the operation of machinery.

You emerge from it, soul scoured, in silence

It’s a remarkable, doubly alienating opening – remote beauty, immediate cruelty. We sense from its abattoir setting that this film is not going to be an optimistic one, our feelings somehow established by its penumbra of mood. One that is particularly East European, perhaps: Enyedi takes us close to desolation in On Body and Soul, although the darkness is not wilful, and it’s leavened by scenes of sparing bleak humour.

Her slaughterhouse protagonists are Endre (Geza Morcsanyi, a non-professional in his first screen role) and Maria (Alexandra Borbely). He is the company’s finance director, overseeing its operation from a professional but benevolent distance; the fact that one of his arms is paralysed somehow emphasises that. She is newly arrived, a quality inspector who grades the meat, a job that involves an exactness of reckoning that almost goes beyond the human.

And although never made specific, Maria is different, uneasy in human interaction and unable to appreciate humour or nuance: her blond beauty isn’t the only thing that recalls The Bridge’s Saga Norén. Maria inhabits a private world in which distinctions are absolute, very different from the one that surrounds her, where they are all too blurred. It’s a society where low-level corruption appears endemic, and may just be the fabric that keeps things together at all (any visit by officialdom to the abattoir invariably ends with a bag of choice cuts pressed into the hands of whoever may be signing off on the forms).

Enyedi is laconic about all of that, and there’s certainly no playing-for-laughs in her depiction of Maria. But, unlikely though it may seem, comedy is not far away. When a theft is discovered from the slaughterhouse veterinary store – bovine aphrodisiac of all things, why it is there at all a typical story – procedure dictates that a psychiatrist (Réka Tenki, very sassy) be brought in to interview staff. No subject is off-limits for her questioning, from earliest sexual experiences to last night’s dreams.

That ushers in the crucial development of Enyedi’s script, and puts the accompanying forest scenes in context: Endre and Maria, too tentative to express feelings to one another in life, are dreaming the same dreams, existing together in a parallel cervine night world (pictured above). That hackneyed line, “See you in my dreams”, becomes for them literally true.

The second half of On Body and Soul has the director negotiate the impact of that contact. Enyedi’s command of detail is exquisite, and best left to speak for itself. Suffice it to say that it can be both excruciating and curiously mundane. Moods move from the desperately comic – imagine Saga Norén forcing herself to feel anything, no matter whether it’s physical sensation or emotion – to the simply desperate, as we approach those iceberg expanses of desperate loneliness (the film’s closing track, Laura Marling’s “What He Wrote”, rings just right).

Ildiko Enyedi emerged on the cinema scene in 1989 with the hugely ambitious My Twentieth Century, for which she won the Camera d’Or prize for best first feature at Cannes that year. On Body and Soul is the first film she has made this century (she worked earlier this decade on the Hungarian version of HBO’s In Treatment, an experience which seems to have been in every sense therapeutic). On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale, its mood somehow in tune with the distinctive flavour of that festival. It would be an illusion to expect every viewer to be receptive to this remarkable film, but for those who are it sticks in the mind like a shard of broken glass, a jag of ice. You emerge from it, soul scoured, in silence.    

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for On Body and Soul