There are three distinct levels in what has to be the most socially important film in present-day European cinema, and what surely is the most socially substantial horror film since South Korea's The Host, the Hungarian movie White God, which is currently playing at the Egyptian and must not be missed if there is in you a love of images that's as primitive as the earliest religions in the world—the elemental worship of light and motion. The first level concerns the sexual awakening of a 13-year-old girl, Lili (Zsófia Psotta), the owner of the dog that goes through a terrible transformation. The second, the European fear of and growing violence toward those perceived as others or strangers or of another civilization with values that are registered as incompatible (they don't like our freedoms!). The third is its complete and even brazen rejection of computer generated images (CGI).

Hundreds of real dogs (all mongrels—no pure breeds) run up and down the streets of Budapest in this movie, and it is visually stunning. What the film makes clear is that computers are just cheap; they cut costs but always at the cost of not really cheating the eye. The eye, which came into its own in the Cambrian period (between 480 and 540 million years ago) and has since developed across a wide spectrum of life (the primary genetic formula for the formation of a fly's eye turns out to be the same as that of a human one—evo-devo is the long history of difference and repetition), knows so many, too many of the tricks of the gods of cinema, light and motion. The pressures to survive have sharpened the vision of life. The director of White God, Kornél Mundruczó, is clearly aware of this situation. And his film would have lost its impact if he had relented to the pressure of investors and resorted to the cheapness of computer images, which are still underdeveloped, still have a long way to go before they are as convincing as a living thing, a real dog.