Six days pass in “The Turin Horse,” each day containing the same dreary rituals that have long occupied the lives of two people on a remote farm. From what we see, the same rituals have probably been in place for many days, weeks and years before that.
“The Turin Horse” describes a slight shift in this routine, because an all-time storm is blowing outside the house, and the farm horse has suddenly refused to work or eat. We can’t know what’s really going on out there, but it begins to look suspiciously like the end of it all.
This is the vision of the critically lauded director Bela Tarr, a Hungarian who makes very slow pictures that usually involve extremely lengthy shots (this 2½-hour movie is composed of just 30 separate shots). Tarr makes demanding films, but he’s earned respect for his unflinching take on human nature.
This film will strike you as either strangely mesmerizing or the most boring thing you’ve ever run across. Tarr isn’t interested in the middle ground of regular movies.
Shooting in razor-sharp black-and-white with a Steadycam that prowls the interior and exterior of farmhouse and yard, Tarr (working with co-director Alice Hranitzky) meticulously observes a father and daughter get dressed in the morning, eat their boiled potatoes, place gear on the horse.
Two visits break up the monotony: a lone neighbor with a theory about why the world has become degraded, and a passing band of gypsies who give the daughter a book of scripture.
Running through much of the movie is a maddeningly repetitive musical loop composed by Mihaly Vig, in which an almost carnival-like organ theme runs beneath a dirge for strings. Like almost everything about this film, the more you experience it, the more it comes to seem like the end of the world.
Is the apocalypse beating on the doors? Something dire is happening, yet Tarr is not interested in showing us what’s going on outside, whether natural or supernatural in origin. He’s interested in the stubbornness with which people cling to their routines, these rituals that initially seem like traps but come to be almost heroic in their execution.
Father and daughter appear to be living a life without anything resembling pleasure or reward, except perhaps for their customary habit of sitting and staring out the window at the hills beyond. Even when the cataclysm drives the light out of the air, they go through their daily rounds.
When all is said and done, how different are the people from the horse, with its blinders and its clockwork duties? Tarr forces you to ponder these ideas, while the world’s last light vanishes, in this hard-to-shake experience.
“The Turin Horse” ½
A hard-to-shake if undeniably challenging film from Hungary’s Bela Tarr, who composes his movie in lengthy shots that emphasize the grueling rituals holding together the lives of a father and daughter (and horse) on a remote farm. Throwing off their daily routine, but only slightly, is a windstorm that begins to resemble the apocalypse itself. In Hungarian, with English subtitles.
Rated: Not rated; probably PG for subject matter.
Showing: Northwest Film Forum.
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