from the novel of the same title by Zoltán N Nagy of the same title a four-part miniseries conceived by Márk Bodzsár

synopsis

The serial killer in the four-part miniseries is the diabolical opposite of the Old Testament prophet Jonah: in the belly of the whale, Vulture has made a pact with the prince of darkness instead of God, and when he comes out into the light, he is not on a holy mission to glorify God and set people right, but to burn the world to ashes. Instead of armies of angels, the Hungarian police are pursuing this ruthless anti-prophet, who has murdered dozens of people from the 1960s to the present day, and who always leaves a card with his victims, with a typewritten quote from Mihály Babits’ poem “The Book of Jonah”: “He who is mute is complicit among sinners.”

In August 2022 – when Budapest is scorched by a sun as hot as the ancient Nineveh sprawling across the desert – Vulture kills again. After a long break. Police officers hoped the beast was dead or in jail for something else. But no, here he is again, and global warming doesn’t seem to have put him off the carnage. And he’s so old, well into his seventies! Can the Babits-obsessed serial killer finally be stopped? Will the guardian angels, singing their “We serve and we protect!” anthem with ever more languid and hoarse voices, defeat the infernal beast?

As we shall see later, the police officers chasing the killer play a very prominent role in the series, but the main character is a civilian, Zalán Szigeti, a restaurant owner in his mid-30s. When he parks in front of his house in Buda on his way home from work, he sees a flamethrower burst into flames in the nearby playground. From the Babits quote found next to the body burnt at the stake, it is clear to the police that they are dealing with the Vulture who, by staging the murder, seems to have been trying to send a message directly to Zalán. Although Zalán is questioned thoroughly, they find nothing to link him to the killer. What would Vulture have to do with a pompous Buda cop boy living in his own bubble of a world?

But it seems the master killer is after Zalán for some reason. There are more and more threatening signs around the man, and since he dislikes the police as much as he dislikes them, Zalán starts investigating on his own. When the cops find out, they make a deal with him: Zalán can join the special investigation team, but only if he cooperates and doesn’t go his own way. Zalán agrees, at least he doesn’t feel like he has to become Sherlock overnight if he doesn’t want to burn at the stake in the summer night. And the cops hope, not without reason, that Zalán will be the key to the Vulture.

For someone who is supposed to catch the country’s most feared killer, the investigation team has been given a room in a stuffy and miserably cramped office. The team consists of three people. Budai is the moustachioed, nicotine-yellowed boss with a raspy voice from too much smoking, who has been chasing Vulture since the 1960s and wants to put an end to the case that is slowly eating away at his nerves before he retires. Radnai, in his forties, is a new generation of cop: impeccable in manners and appearance, modern technology fits as naturally into his hands as his service weapon. The lowest-ranking member of the team is a woman in her thirties, Blanka, whose father also served in homicide and worked on the Vulture case until his death. The young investigator is tasked with Zalán’s godfather, and Budai assigns the pair, who initially have no sympathy for each other, the seemingly insignificant task of digging deep into Zalán’s personal past and looking through old files and books to find out what Vulture might have to do with Mihály Babits.

As the investigation progresses, more and more bodies are found, and the increasingly desperate police officers face not only the threat of dismissal, but also a fatal encounter with the beast’s socialist-style murder tools, the sickle and the hammer: the serial killer sends them each a separate business card, saying that they could be in line at any time. Just when all the clues have turned out to be dead ends, ironically, a breakthrough occurs on the least exciting thread: Zalán and Blanka, “the library gang” as Budai calls them, become increasingly close, love is born, and during their evenings of reflection together they find the link between Vulture and Babits.

Ildikó, the adopted child of the poet prince and Sophie Török, only found out after Babits’ death that her parents were not blood relations. An abortion as a teenager left Ildikó unable to give birth, and she wanted to adopt an orphaned boy. But her mother thwarted the adoption and disinherited her daughter. Ildiko, with nothing to lose, emigrated to England, leaving the almost adopted child trapped in the world of foster care, where she suffers a lot of abuse. Freed from state care, she is ready to become an anti-prophet with a Babits complex and a God complex, at enmity with the whole world. Vulture.

The Babitsian backstory and the Book of Jonah, the culmination of the poet’s oeuvre, interweave and counterpoint the sometimes highly moody investigation, which moves from corpse to corpse. The most astonishing twist comes when the present and the past come together in the person of Zalán: it turns out that the son of Vulture, thought to be dead, is alive after all, and was born to the same mother who gave birth to Zalán. All along, the police had thought they were looking for a vulture in his late seventies, a man who was stale but still killing with youthful fervour, but the murders in the present were committed by Vulture’s son and Zalán’s half-brother. Who is now planning a fratricide. Zalán was indeed the final target. In order for him and Blanka to survive, he must take out his half-brother. (Warning, huge spoiler coming!) Who is none other than Radnai. The model detective has built up a fake identity as a teenager, and has infiltrated the police force to lead the detectives chasing Vulture by the nose. Then Radnai got a taste for murder – he killed his own father. But Zalán overcomes him without becoming a murderer himself: He and Blanka render Radnai harmless and send him to prison.

The path that Zalán takes throughout the story is somewhat similar to that of Jonah: from prideful solitude, he gradually turns towards others and a higher mission. He doesn’t become a prophet, but he learns to love, to bond and to take responsibility for others. Blanka says ironically: “Poetry is a force that shapes the personality. But it’s not just that: it also took Vulture and Radnai, the father-son serial killer duo, to make Zalán a different person. It is by going through hell that he comes out into the light. Like Jonah escaping from the pitch-black belly of a whale.

The Vulture is a closed crime thriller told in four times fifty minutes. The first season of True Detective and Mindhunter can be seen as series prequels, but its world of darkness and horror mixed with wry humour and social commentary is also akin to feature films such as Zodiac and the South Korean The Deathly Hallows. Because the story is both strongly Hungarian and universal, and because it employs the tried and tested techniques of the crime thriller, it has the potential to appeal to a wider audience on streaming platforms, beyond our borders. The target audience is 25 to 45 year olds who love crime fiction and literature.

Author’s note:

The tender treatment deviates from the novel in only a few points, but in order to deepen Zalán’s character drama, to make the investigation more twisty and the love story richer and more relatable, a more decisive departure from the original work seems necessary. This would not mean a complete rethinking, nor even the inclusion of new characters, but it would mean dropping certain threads and incorporating and strengthening new story motifs.