Richard and Attila Csanyi as babies.Crave
Attila
Directed by Stephen Hosier
Classification N/A; 79 minutes
Streaming on Crave starting Jan. 22
Critic’s Pick
There are three stories being told in Stephen Hosier’s startling and immersive new Canadian documentary Attila.
The first is the downward spiral of Attila Csanyi, a young man who endured a traumatic childhood inside Ontario’s brutal foster-care system only to develop a drug addiction that, compounded with his schizophrenia, left him bouncing between unstable living situations. His tale unfortunately ended in May 2020, when the 28-year-old was found dead on the rooftop of a Hamilton office complex after overdosing.
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The second tale here is that of Attila’s twin brother, Richard, who teams up with his childhood friend, the filmmaker Hosier, to investigate his sibling’s final days. As the pair search for the friend who last saw Attila alive – and who nearly overdosed himself – the film begins to scratch away at Richard’s own addictions, regrets and refusal to let his own life end the same way as his brother’s.
But it is the third and final narrative thread of Hosier’s film that ensures Attila lingers uneasily and effectively, as the doc paints a portrait of Hamilton as a city haunted and perhaps irrevocably altered by the opioid crisis.
Shifting between grainy home-movie footage of the young Csanyi siblings at play and pavement-pounding explorations into Hamilton’s darker corners – its short-term rentals and massage parlours, its unkempt parks and ER waiting rooms – Hosier weaves together a deeply empathetic horror story that should serve as a shock to the system.
Richard Csanyi driving through Hamilton, searching for Steven who was the last person to see Attila alive.Crave
While there is certainly hope to be found in Richard’s quest to honour his brother and reckon with his own traumatic past, this is not a prescriptive film offering easy answers, here to reassure or coddle audiences. Attila is instead a deeply upsetting and rightfully angry film that forces the viewer to confront a kind of systematic social precariousness that we have all accepted for far too long. If the current political climate insists on slapping a new coat of paint over Canada’s opioid crisis and calling it a day, Hosier admirably and stubbornly peels back that façade.
Hosier’s debut feature-length doc, Attila heralds an immensely promising and uncompromising talent. Tightly paced and shot with a you-are-here-whether-you-like-it-or-not intensity – with cinematography duties split between the director himself, Jordan Kennington (The Swearing Jar), and Nikolay Michaylov (Anne at 13,000 Ft.) – the doc boasts a firm grip and steady hand.
Richard visits childhood friends, Fraser Mitchell and David Smith, in Lindsay, Ont.Crave
Not that there aren’t cracks. Hosier’s script elides certain personal-history details – there is only a vague answer as to why Attila and Richard were first removed from their parents’ custody as six-year-olds – and he attempts to put too much emotional and narrative weight on a climax that feels slightly less important than it is being presented.
But in terms of understanding and confronting the harsh reality that so many Canadians endure today, Attila is remarkable, verging on essential, filmmaking.
Barry Hertz