The Turin Horse

2011 Director Béla Tarr

This film, in some ways, is the most extreme of Tarr's films and yet the simplest. Co-written, once again, by novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, The Turin Horse is a minimalist distillation of Tarr's cinema: little more than a man, a woman, a horse, a house, some wretched weather, and very few words. The narrative content is so slender that it's barely even an anecdote, yet the film has the disturbing resonance of some ancient imponderable fable.

It all begins in darkness, as a narrator intones the apocryphal tale of how Nietzsche went mad – supposedly after seeing a horse beaten in Turin. After this incident, the German philosopher lapsed forever more into silence. The punchline: "No one knows what happened to the horse".
Thereafter, it's as if the film – indeed, the whole world – turns to near-silence. The story is told with few words but strong images, shot in long, sinuously executed takes.

This is a film of uncertainties – and because there's nothing solid to grasp in the narrative, what we cling to is the texture of the film itself. We become attentive to the ritualistic repetition of actions, to the prowling camera moves that map out the contours of this enclosed but oddly elastic universe, and to the eerie sound design – along with Mihaly Vig's creaky, dirge-like score, a ghastly three-note refrain has been mixed eerily into the sound of the wind itself, not just hauntingly but fit to drive you mad.

Shot in ascetically beautiful black and white by Fred Kelemen, this could almost be a documentary about 19th-century peasant life at its most challenging. But there's a mysterious metaphysical resonance about The Turin Horse that makes for the enigmatic numinousness of a Kafka parable. This is cinema so spare and silent it's on the verge of being Trappist cinema – and that is eloquence indeed.