Woyzeck wasn't finished when Georg Büchner died in 1837. Yet this grim, socially conscious drama became the playwright's most celebrated work when it was published after his death, earning acclaim in his native Germany and many other countries where its bleak view of the human condition touched a nerve.

What makes its success especially striking is the fact that Büchner didn't clarify the order of the scenes he'd written, or which exact scenes-jotted down in four separate manuscripts-he planned to include in the final draft. One more week and the uncertainty would have vanished, but typhoid fever killed him just eight days before the delivery date he'd given to his publisher. Until recently, Büchner experts thought he meant Woyzeck to be an avant-garde experiment with "open" or "non-Aristotelian" theater, deliberately written in a fragmentary way so audiences would have to piece together its meanings on their own. But the latest scholarship suggests that Büchner intended no such thing, and would have arranged the fragments into a traditional narrative structure if he hadn't abruptly died.

None of this has prevented Woyzeck from being popular with filmmakers. At least five movie adaptations have been produced, plus at least seven TV productions and several screen versions of Wozzeck, the opera composed by Alban Berg in 1925. (That title comes from an 1880 book edition, put together by an Austrian who misspelled the protagonist's name.) The best known Woyzeck is Werner Herzog's adaptation, filmed in 1979 with Herzog's favorite actor, Klaus Kinski, as the eponymous protagonist.

The most recent Woyzeck movie is Hungarian, written and directed by János Szász in 1994. Szász has the right credentials for adapting plays, since he's highly respected as a theater director in Hungary and abroad, and he's also an experienced filmmaker, with both dramatic pictures and documentaries to his credit. He shares Büchner's interest in politics; besides his Holocaust documentaries he has directed plays by Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss, both strongly political dramatists. Woyzeck, his second feature film, leaves no doubt that he also shares Büchner's pessimism about humanity, although he's less radical than the German author, who advocated violent revolution when he wasn't busy at his writing desk or holding down his day job as a professor of anatomy.

In keeping with Büchner's hugely suspicious view of power and authority, the play's protagonist is a German soldier who's being treated for mental illness by a provincial doctor who fancies himself a philosopher as well as a physician. Woyzeck is thus subject to two different forms of authoritarian control: military discipline, which demands total obedience, and medical science, which claims to understand our bodies and minds better than we ourselves do. Büchner based the character on three real-life men who murdered their mistresses in the early nineteenth century; all of them were marginalized people whose crimes stirred up much public controversy in their day.

Szász has taken many liberties with Büchner's play, but its spirit still comes across powerfully. The movie's setting is modern-possibly the 1960s, when Hungary was in the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. (This is still another layer of authoritarianism looming over the title character.) Instead of being a soldier, Woyzeck is a signalman in a railroad yard presided over by a boss who demands as much obedience as a military officer would expect. In other respects Szász remains reasonably faithful to the play. Woyzeck spends much of his time at work, where his duties include shaving his superior with a straight razor and resisting the temptation to slit his throat. When he's at home he enjoys seeing his illegitimate baby, but apart from this he faces a wall of indifference, since his mistress, Mari, is having an affair and doesn't particularly want him around. Mari's lover is a drum major in the play but in the movie he's a policeman, another authority figure who wishes Woyzeck no good.

In the meanwhile, Woyzeck's mind-probably not that strong to begin with-is losing its grip on reality, wandering more and more into abstract ramblings, mystical visions, and fever dreams. His physician, clearly a quack with delusions of grandeur, is making things worse instead of better, limiting the patient to a peas-only diet, keeping tabs on his urination habits, and cooking up nonsensical formulas in hopes of changing the course of science. All this would be enough to drive Woyzeck crazy even if he hadn't already gotten there on his own. It's hardly surprising that his story ends in a nasty eruption of violence and misery.

Szász's movie, photographed by Tibor Máthé, mirrors the darkness of Woyzeck's life with a brooding visual style that's often shadowy and sometimes downright murky in tone. (You can sense the kindred spirit of Szász's more famous compatriot, Béla Tarr, hovering over many scenes.) This somberness is very different from the near-hysterical approach of Herzog's interpretation; where Herzog tries to overwhelm you with Woyzeck's agony, Szász wants to creep you out with the infectiousness of his madness. Hungarian actor Lajos Kovács easily dominates the film as Woyzeck, although Diana Vacaru as Mari and Sándor Gáspár as the police officer also stand out. A crowning touch is Szász's use of music by the seventeenth-century English composer Henry Purcell, whose stately baroque sensibility-here embodied by an elegant countertenor solo-suits the film's timeless air to perfection.

Szász's adaptation of Woyzeck has won many honors; one source credits it with earning twenty prizes at the fifty-five international film festivals where it's been shown, and it garnered the European Film Award for best picture of 1994 by a young director. The new DVD edition is short on extras, but it effectively captures the film's stark, moody atmosphere. Moviegoers familiar with Büchner's original will need a little time to absorb the differences in Szász's version-the omission of Woyzeck's friend Andres, for instance, and the way the film opens with a child's voice speaking a sad soliloquy that Szász has purloined from a grandmother's speech near the end of the play. Once you adjust, though, you'll find this a memorable interpretation that makes a nineteenth-century drama seem harrowingly fresh and relevant.

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by David Sterritt