Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A look at the monotonous daily struggle of a father and daughter in a windswept, desolate landscape. Over six days, their routine of eating boiled potatoes and tending a failing horse crumbles, symbolizing a slow descent into darkness, emptiness, and the end of existence.
Béla Tarr's final film is a landmark of slow cinema — six days of ritualistic repetition filmed in extraordinary long takes by Fred Kelemen, with an overwhelming black-and-white palette that renders existential dread viscerally physical. The performances by János Derzsi and Erika Bók achieve a kind of elemental, wordless authenticity that transcends conventional acting. Novelty is essentially maximal: the film's austere, hypnotic form — returning daily cycles of the same actions until reality dissolves — is utterly singular. The ending, while philosophically coherent (darkness literally extinguishing everything), can feel more foregone than revelatory after the deliberate repetition, making it the category where the film earns slightly less. The 'plot' in a traditional sense is minimal by design, but its symbolic architecture is rigorously constructed.