Budapest has already been the setting for a dystopian film or two – most of Blade Runner 2049 was shot over four months here in 2016 – but with so many eerie, post-industrial ruins around, there’s always room for more. Here are five great suggestions for all you location scouts out there!
1/5
Gellért Hill reservoir
Tall and slender columns, imposing walls, spooky lights and a constant echoing murmur characterise József Gruber’s water reservoir, open for the public to view once a year on World Water Day. Walking through the huge pool space of 40,000 cubic metres feels like a deserted landscape. The graceful columns around which the water flows could even be the petrified stumps of a burned forest, but a world after a nuclear explosion also comes to mind, the creepy feeling accentuated if you come at twilight. At the central hub for Budapest’s water supply, you could easily imagine an end-of-the-world scenario or some scenes from The Matrix.
2/5
Kelenföld Power Plant
This is the building that many consider the pinnacle of Hungarian Art-Deco architecture, especially because of its control room, whose huge glass roof was put together from small pieces. In this space, you can easily imagine that sometime in the 2200s, groups from the underground resistance weave secret plans to reclaim the land and overthrow the repressive system. The association is obviously not a coincidence, as the Kelenföld Power Plant, completed in the 1930s, has appeared in several Sci-Fi films, although typically as the headquarters of the bad guys.
3/5
Lipótmező sanatorium
It’s been empty for years, so today it’s pretty creepy to wander around the crumbling staircase of the Lipótmező sanatorium, between dilapidated walls and empty autopsy tables. In corridors five metres high, pipes protrude from walls scrawled with childish graffiti. In ever they do a remake of the 2008 film Blindness starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo – victims of a mysterious epidemic locked in an abandoned hospital – this would be just the place.
4/5
Metro 4 stations
You find some
of the best contemporary architecture in Budapest not above ground, but below
– and not in one building but ten, all in a line. At each station along Metro
4, it’s worth getting off and exploring all the little details because it’s
guaranteed to set the imagination racing. Immersing yourself into the chasm between
the concrete netting penetrating Fővám tér and the corten steel covering the
wall is like jumping ahead into time, but not to a happy utopia – though it’s
considered a masterpiece of design. It’s the same at
the next stop, Kálvin tér, the semi-tubular escalator making you feel as if you’re
on a huge mothership.
5/5
North Pest Hospital
It is not difficult to find abandoned buildings on the outskirts of Budapest, but the only Art-Nouveau hospital in Hungary is in terrible condition. One of the more modern blocks in Pestújhely built in the 1930s was designed by the most dynamic architects of the day, Farkas Molnár and József Fischer, but today its forbidding appearance means it’s inadvisable to approach, let alone exploring inside. On the other hand, between crumbling, abandoned buildings overgrown with weeds, it’s quite easy to think of anti-utopian scenarios in which society has completely disintegrated after some devastating catastrophe.
