Appropriate to the director's family name of Tarr, "The Man From London" is akin to walking on an endless runway strip of newly laid-on tarmac.
In the light of current popular-culture standards, the film is decidedly viewer-unfriendly; the dialogue spoken by an international cast is dubbed in Hungarian, the visuals are shot in aggressively stark black and white and the story involves an unglamorous, guilt-ridden nightwatchman. But then Bela Tarr has always resisted working inside the magnetic field of commercial filmmaking — it's not that he defies marketing logic so much as choosing to be unaware that such a thing exists.
Tarr takes a regular three to five years to make a single film and these require three to five hours to watch, which is mainly why it's so rare to see them outside the film-festival circuit.