A rural farmer is forced to confront the mortality of his faithful horse.
This film takes work, but its effect, once you’ve opened yourself to it, is profound.
Tarr risks self-parody with recurring scenes of the pair tucking into scalding potatoes, but if you’ve got the stomach for it this is an intoxicating vision of life at the end of its tether.
Apocalyptic and deeply challenging, Béla Tarr’s swan-song as a director is a fitting end to his enigmatic career.
The Hungarian auteur's gnomic, slow-moving storytelling style and grim absurdism demand patience but the formal mastery here is astounding.
Little happens and everything that does is open to interpretation but feels like a gruelling reflection on a world at the end of time.
The movie exerts an eerie grip, with echoes of Bresson, Bergman and Dreyer, but is utterly distinctive: a vision of a world going inexorably into a final darkness.
This is cinema so spare and silent it's on the verge of being Trappist cinema – and that is eloquence indeed.
The themes are death, compassion and endurance, but it isn't clear how specific the allegory is. At the end, however, you feel – like the wedding guest buttonholed by the Ancient Mariner – that you've had an experience.
Rumoured to be his last picture, this reverently photographed monotony is closer to caricature than a final valedictory artwork.
A magnificent, towering achievement.
Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr retires from directing with a final film so over-wrought it almost feels like an arthouse parody.
Bela Tarr: Interview
Edinburgh Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Friday June 15, 2012, until Wednesday June 20, 2012. More info: www.filmhousecinema.com
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