The Joan of Arc themes, acknowledged debt to Béla Tarr, and unavoidable comparisons to Lars von Trier catch one’s attention, but Michael Brooke’s skeptical Sight & Sound review suggest that Mundruczó may be echoing the worst rather than the best of his influences. Still, Brooke says Delta looks great, and at 95 minutes (so much for the Tarr Effect) might be worth investigating.
Kornél Mundruczó is one of the more distinctive Hungarian auteurs to emerge in the new millennium. His previous feature Johanna (2005) was an operatic updating of the legend of Joan of Arc to a modern hospital. . . . Delta is structurally and thematically very similar in being about a mysterious stranger infiltrating a close-knit community, triggering an upset by seemingly flouting the laws of nature (in this case his incestuous attraction to his half-sister), which unnerves the local populace to the point of murderous rage. Johanna and Delta also share a generous helping of explicitly sexualised violence. . . .
Other elements ape the work of Mundruczó’s sometime colleague Béla Tarr with only fitful success. . . . The film is at its most compelling in the long, contemplative, largely wordless sequences where something drifts across the delta. . . . Frequently stunning images are accompanied by a carefully orchestrated sound-blanket, a ringing electronic drone, or Félix Lajkó’s spare, string-based score. . . .
The women…are infuriatingly passive, submitting to everything from casual slights to rape with little more than a pained, silent stare. Their worn, wan faces and stooped, submissive body language convey a lifetime of toil and oppression, but this is scarecely a novel observation, nor a particularly edifying one.Michael Brooke, Sight & Sound, May 2009