Werckmeister Harmonies (12A)

★★★★★ Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr and his co-director and editor Ágnes Hranitzky now have their 2000 film re-released as part of a career retrospective; it is an eerie monochrome vision of power, group hysteria, cosmological breakdown and the end of the world. ~ The Guardian, 2024 review.

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A cinema 4K restoration of one of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s 2000 mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance.

Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown era in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince—arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens, which builds inexorably toward violence and destruction.

In thirty-nine of his signature long takes, engraved in ghostly black and white, Tarr conjures an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.

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★★★★★ The Hungarian director Bella Tar goes beyond surreal, beyond miserablism beyond anything I have ever seen, with this quite bizarre, dream-like film in monochrome. ~ The Guardian, 2000 review.

★★★★ Named after 17th century musical theorist-composer Andreas Harmóniák, it's a work whose meanings are almost impossible to pin down. ~ BBC.

★★★★ But while this is anything but an easy watch, it's also a film packed with memorable images. For once, understanding is less important than experiencing. ~ Empire.