By about an hour into Laszlo Nemes’ period drama “Sunset,” you may have lost count of just how many times the lead character, a young woman in 1910 Budapest, has been told “don’t go there” by a succession of glowering, bearded men, plus the occasional glowering woman.
Irisz, the central character, keeps going where she’s not supposed to — and you could say the same about Nemes, who thrives on creating chaos onscreen and rarely feels compelled in “Sunset” to let the audience get its bearings.
That makes “Sunset” audacious and confounding, a movie that takes on the fall of an empire through the prism of a hat shop and challenges viewers to keep up at every murky turn.