Review: Documentary Film, Meant to Be

May 18, 2026

Reviewed by Guilherme Quireza

Warning: Contains spoilers for Meant to Be

Pogány Induló is only twenty, but he already looks worn down. In Hungary, he is famous, with a young audience that echoes his words back to him. It looks like the dream: fame, success, a launched career. Instead, success reached him before he knew what to do with it–and with it, the cost of success.

In Meant to Be, directed by Olivér Márk Tóth and produced by HBO, the young rapper moves through a life that has moved faster than he can process. Pogány Induló, born Marcell Szirmai, goes from a youthful hunger for recognition to a life organized around being seen. Since childhood, he has been in front of cameras, first as a YouTuber, chasing attention before he had any real protection from it. The privacy of a normal upbringing was gone early, and his life slowly took shape around visibility.

From the first scenes, the home around him is already coming apart. His parents argue often and the house becomes harder to live in. Slowly, the family learns how to live around something broken. Pogány tells the camera that he is fine after his parents announce their divorce, that it does not weigh on him. The camera closes in on his tired face, with no one else in the room. A detail shot shows his dirty, bruised feet while he lies curled up alone on the dressing-room couch, trying to rest. 

Then he is back onstage. In “Diktátor,” he sings about looking in the mirror and asking, “Who am I?” The line lands differently after the scene at home. It is no longer just a young rapper playing tough. Even if he says he is fine, his songs prove him to be a liar at best, and someone with a deeper struggle that is likely to erupt if ignored. The lyrics begin to carry the heavy feeling Induló refused to utter.

As he moves into rap, Induló starts adopting a harder public surface. The performance grows heavier. It gives him another role to maintain. The more he tries to look untouchable, the more exposed the songs become. The hardness is real, but so is the hurt leaking through it.

The family changes with the career. As his success grows, school falls away. He leaves high school before graduating, and the decision does not feel like freedom exactly. His mother shows concern, but the family is also becoming more dependent on his success. Her worry has to live beside the fact that his success helps the family survive. The child’s dream has turned into work, and the work has started supporting a circle larger than himself. Now, as a young man, he moves through one stressful concert after another: phones always nearby, no time to rest.

The songs become an outlet for his worst feelings. For a while, music holds him together. Those challenging emotions become part of the act, and the audience asks for them again and again. The adoration gives him purpose.

Induló’s body starts to give way almost as quickly as his fame grows. He is still changing, and not in a clean upward line. The child who dreamed of fame and the rapper now filling huge venues sit beside each other, along with his ADHD, panic, substance use, and the increasing scrutiny around him. They keep rubbing against each other.

As the shows grow bigger, drugs and alcohol stop looking like occasional interruptions in his life and more like part of the rhythm that keeps him going. After performances, the camera often finds him collapsed backstage, emptied after another night that has taken too much from him. The bigger the stage gets, the more wrecked he looks once he leaves it. The mornings after are worse, but in a quieter way. The noise of the show is gone, but the disorder remains: rooms left in chaos, the dull aftermath of a night that was supposed to prove everything was working. They are part of the same life as the music and the fame.

This way of living enters the songs. The heavy drinking, the refusal to slow down, all of it becomes part of the image Pogány sells and then has to live inside. Even as his physical and mental health begin to fail, the lifestyle becomes harder to escape. He grows sadder, more isolated. His relationship with his girlfriend falls apart. The persona keeps expanding while the person inside it shrinks.

And curiously, his self-destructive style pulls the audience closer. People can relate to the chaos, to the struggle. The more he sinks, the larger the stages become. The damage starts to look like proof of authenticity, and then like something marketable.

Around him, collapse often looks like style. The exhaustion is not hidden, nor are the drugs, the anger, or the need to look untouchable. They seep into the music and the way people present themselves. The young people around him recognize themselves in his damage, and that recognition feels contaminated by glamour.

Hungary’s drug laws make that image riskier. With drug possession and the promotion of drug use now criminalized, the lifestyle around Induló becomes easier to turn into evidence. Already strained by fame, he also risks becoming an example. His private damage gets pulled into public debate, and even performance carries legal and political risk. Curiously, when asked by the end of the film about the future, Induló seems content if it all ended right now. He acknowledges that his life is not healthy and should not be replicated, but is not open to leaving it all behind himself. 

At twenty, reinvention should be ordinary. For Induló, it looks forced and sped up by the presence of an audience. Today, his transformations are discussed and are attracting international public scrutiny, only to be folded back into the business around him almost as soon as they occur. Indeed, he is still forming. He is young. The world around him keeps asking for something finished: a star or a problem? Maybe even a symbol for Gen Z?

Calling him the voice of a generation risks taking too much from him. Still, the crowd gives the songs back to him as pressure. Pogány Induló gives shape to a restlessness that often appears as anger, and to a loneliness that often appears as numbness. The film exquisitely captures a young artist who is falling  apart in public, while the world around him keeps treating the image as exciting.