“The Turin Horse,” at UWM Union Theatre

Once in a great while, a film comes along that has the ability to completely submerge you into its cinematic world. When this happens, the film reaches inside you, and you forget that you’re watching a movie. I’m not talking about movies that take you on a ride only to drop you at a tidy destination, but films that allow you simply to exist within them. Hungarian director Bela Tarr‘s award winning film The Turin Horse has this quality in spades, and provides a difficult but ultimately extremely rewarding experience.

The film begins with a parable about Friedrich Nietzsche and his attempt to save a stubborn horse from being beaten by its master. According to the story, after this encounter, Nietzsche went on to lose his mind and live out the rest of his days quietly in bed. This opening parable operates mostly as a backdrop to the tale of rural devastation that follows.

Instead of Nietzsche, we follow the beaten horse and his masters through the perpetual drudgery that is their lives. Great care is taken in documenting their tedious daily rituals, and Tarr is effectively able to make such dull activities as boiling potatoes, fetching water from a well, and looking out a window seem compelling. Tarr hypnotizes you for about two hours with his picturesque silent agony, which leads you into a false sense that there will be no plot to come. Although there is no grand sweeping narrative in The Turin Horse, by its end some very strange changes occur that could be interpreted as biblical or even borderline paranormal.

Bela Tarr is no stranger to this slow demanding format (his previous work Satantango runs a whopping seven and a half hours with similar pacing), nor is he the first to depict such nuanced banality. Chantal Akerman’s masterwork Jeanne Dielman immediately comes to mind as a kindred spirit to The Turin Horse, as it depicts, for three hours, the daily comings and goings of a repressed homemaker. Both films completely envelope their viewers in a sort of quarantined existence. While trapped within the filmmaker’s parameters, the viewer is basically left to interpret what they may.

If interpretation isn’t your thing, the film has other pleasures to offer, most notably its stark photography. Although it hopes to depict a completely uncompromising word, The Turin Horse is absolutely gorgeous. Shot on 35mm black and white film, Tarr’s mind-bogglingly long tracking shots have never looked more beautiful. The camera almost becomes a character in the film, as it takes on the form of a ghost-like apparition that floats around the set, shifting its gaze from close-ups on despair to wind-drenched dead landscapes.

Two and a half hours may seem like a long time to watch people perform chores, but I challenge anyone to not be completely mesmerized by this film. It is very important, however, that you first trust the director, and give him the benefit of the doubt while the film gets rolling. Yes, the minutes slowly peel away, but your experience of time will become relative, and by the end you will be surprised (for a number of reasons) that the credits are already rolling.

For more information on films screening at the UWM Union Theatre, click here.