Turin Horse (A torinói ló)

Composed in rigorously measured long takes and photographed in stark black-and-white, Béla Tarr’s final feature is an elemental meditation on endurance, exhaustion, and the limits of belief.

In 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a carriage driver beating his horse, embraced the animal, and soon after fell into the silence that marked the final decade of his life. Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky begin where that anecdote ends, turning their attention to the driver and his daughter as they endure six days of wind, labor, and dwindling light on a desolate plain. Based on a screenplay by Tarr and novelist László Krasznahorkai, the film reduces narrative to repetition: dressing, fetching water, boiling potatoes, waiting. Composed in rigorously measured long takes and photographed by Fred Kelemen in stark black-and-white, Tarr’s final feature is an elemental meditation on endurance, exhaustion, and the limits of belief.