The Visitor (2025) ‘Karlovy Vary’ Movie Review: Vytautas Katkus’ debut casts a wispy look at the act of lingering

In Vytautas Katkus’ The Visitor, a man returns to a once-familiar place now rendered alien. Danielius (Darius Šilėnas) rambles through the town where he spent his childhood. There are known faces now drenched in a layer of alienation. The relationships he might have had are overrun by the vicissitudes of time. People change, associations shift, intimacy retreats. One is confronted with the task of having to rebuild relationships from scratch, yet some reserve exists. It’s not so much about fissures as there’s baulking from others to meet and engage as friends and kindred souls. Danielius himself feels hesitant at times to hurl himself into intimacy. He tries, but the chasms are tough to rub out or negate. They are very much calcified.

Living in Norway and newly turned parent, he heads to his Lithuanian hometown to sell his parents’ flat. Gradually, he thrusts himself before people in the town. He readily offers to tag along on someone’s journey, suggesting he’s headed the same way. He seeks company. Or is it consolation? It is a bid for reconnecting to places and encounters of his childhood, things he might have felt he left long behind. Katkus keeps things light and spare, inclining to the redolent rather than distinctly established. The plangent undertow, nevertheless, registers strongly. An ache builds unobtrusively. One witnesses the man moving through a certain geography, social circles, always tinged on the periphery. He’s not even always invited, rather left unthought of. There’s a space in between. In this, one pours their intuitions into Danielius’ thoughts and anxieties.

As the film swirls through Danielius’ wanderings, it desists in tracing with clear delineations his moody stupor. He straggles through the town, silently yearning for the lost, those that have got plucked out of view ages ago. The film’s softly interpretive bend lets one draw assumptions, guided by how he approaches particular encounters. Often, he’s just an onlooker, curious and desiring but withheld and bashful. He exerts himself only when his desperation for comfort pokes harder. Occasionally, he asks others if he can come in for a cup of tea. The vagueness and seeming desultoriness of the film’s rhythms develop a gently compelling pull.

Along with his editor Laurynas Bareiša (director of last year’s elliptically structured Locarno winner, Drowning Dry), Katkus crafts a loose-limbed energy, embodied in an ambling Šilėnas. One watches him in a sort of time silo. Away from family and loved ones, the man seems to be looking for something one cannot quite pin down. He is committed to inhabiting the present. Eating his ice-cream, he allows himself to be indulgently propelled by each day’s new sensations and want. Yes, the inevitability of this window of time soon closing in hangs in the air. Neither is Danielius exactly keen on elongating it. Yet, he’s caught in a peculiar stasis, struggling to reconcile with why he’s still lingering. In one of the most quietly wrenching scenes, Danielius asks Vismanté’s father (Arvydas Dapšys) if he could be his dad. The latter is initially taken aback. But he shows kindness and warmth.

The Visitor refuses to dip into fixed convictions of emotional states. There’s an elusiveness with which the director situates an emotional tone, though it’s largely subdued. Feelings come through more in random swathes than a direct continuity. The film breaks them into scattered shards, stashed aside for one to riffle through and make tentative conclusions. Sometimes, it goes into wavering tangents but as long as it pivots back to Danielius’ strange, suspended state, one stays piqued.

Katkus holds back from any exegesis on a backstory, the years Danielius spent at this place. What made him move to Norway? The hushed film is disinterested in spelling it all out, preferring the viewer to patiently walk alongside its protagonist, respecting the considerable, slowed-down time he hopes for. At some point, lines between his intense inner retreat and emotional isolation blur. He clutches for understanding, to be seen with empathy even as he shuts out his recesses. Over the course of his muted inner reckoning, he earns a steady accretion of attention, asking for some form of reassurance. The Visitor takes its time, but eventually gathers an abiding ache.

The Visitor premiered at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2025.

The Visitor (2025) Movie Links: IMDb