Mission elapsed time 21,067 days.
Good afternoon, beloved -
Is it legitimate, I wonder, to think of a film as one of your favorites if you’ve only seen it twice in fifteen years, and honestly may never need to see it again?
Yesterday I took the bus down to Close-Up in Shoreditch for a late-afternoon showing of Béla Tarr’s 2011 The Turin Horse, his final feature. I’d bought my ticket the moment I saw the listing in Close-Up’s weekly email, and a good thing I did, too: somewhat unexpectedly, for a film with such a forbidding reputation, the screening was entirely sold out. (In retrospect, I think we can chalk this up to Tarr’s death last month, which may well be why Close-Up chose to rescreen the film now, and mmmmaybe as well the fact that Turin Horse co-screenwriter and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai took home last year’s Nobel Prize for literature.)
You know, not a whole lot happens in The Turin Horse. In schematic, it depicts six days in the life of a horsecart driver named Ohlsdorfer and his adult daughter, in the bare peasant hut they share, somewhere in the wastes of the Carpathian Basin circa 1889. Each morning, the pair wake into the bleak light left to them by an unceasing, unvarying tempest. The daughter painstakingly dresses her father, who has at some point in the past been deprived of the use of his right arm. They sit down to a miserable, boundlessly unappetizing meal of boiled potatoes (he with a few sprinkled grains of salt, she without even that). She trudges head-down to the well to haul back a few buckets of water, or to the tumbledown stable adjacent, to muck out the soiled straw and try to coax the horse on whom their livelihood depends to eat. Afterwards she sits dumbly at the window, and gazes out into the drab vortical nothingness howling just the other side of it. Once a neighbor comes barging in to buy a bottle of the pálinka Ohlsdorfer brews, and rant some about ruin and debasement. What few words pass between father and daughter are curt, functional, loveless and without warmth. At all times, the wind moans unrelentingly. That’s it.
Or that’s it, rather, except for that across those six days the world runs down and comes to an end. The horse steadily refuses the hay she’s given, and weakens into a terminal lassitude. The well mysteriously goes dry. In desperation, father and daughter load their few meagre things onto a hand cart and haul it laboriously up toward the high road, only to turn around without explanation and return, seemingly mere minutes later. On the last day, the wind finally dies, “a dead silence” falls over the hut, and soon thereafter the daylight itself simply stops, as abruptly as if someone’s thrown a breaker. The oil lamps they reach for, though full, won’t hold a flame; the banked embers in the stove flicker and fade; at the end, all that remains is father urging daughter to the cold vile meal of raw potatoes before them, as they themselves are swallowed by the swiftly encroaching nonlight.
For me this last scene feels like nothing so much as a depiction, at human scale and in human terms, of proton decay and the evaporation of black holes at the very end of time (!). It’s far and away the most truly apocalyptic thing I’ve ever seen onscreen, and the only filmic depiction of the end of all things I know of to capture the not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper way I imagine it will surely be at the end. In turn, this success feels like it owes a lot to one of the qualities I love best about the film, which is the heavy sense of placelessness and timelessness that shrouds it: while there are, without doubt, material and social details in what you see that situate the action firmly in its implied place and period, they’re flattened to the point of nihilation and inconsequence. These six days, increasingly impoverished in every dimension of being, could well be unfolding anywhere and anywhen. Of everything I’ve seen, in fact, what The Turin Horse most reminds me of is the final half-hour of Threads, which famously takes place in the weeks, months and years after a global thermonuclear exchange.
One of the tactics that so effectively seals the film’s oppressive mood is a feature of its sound design you’d ordinarily be tempted to think of as amateurish, were it not (as I can only assume it was) entirely intentional. Other than Mihály Víg’s descending, almost rudimentary threnody of a score, which drops away for long stretches only to dip back in at those moments its reappearance emphasizes the airless and eternal return of the same, the only thing you hear on the soundtrack is the keening wind; the amateurish bit consists in the fact that the looped sound effect is so short that you’re entirely conscious of it, too, repeating interminably. The audible seam destroys any pretense of naturalism, and at times threatens to draw just a little bit too much attention to the fabular aspects of the set-up. But your consciousness of the repeating loop achieves exactly what you suspect it was intended to. The dread I felt every time I heard it start again is fully the equal of what I experienced reading classics of claustrophobia like Anna Kavan’s Ice, or Ferenc Karinthy’s equally nightmarish Metropole (what is it about Hungarians, anyway?).
There are partial precedents, perhaps. As a high-resolution chronicle of the texture of peasant life, the only film I can think of that seriously rivals Tarr here is Dominique Benicheti’s well-loved 1973 Cousin Jules, while the same repetition and futility and (especially) paucity of speech suffuse Kaneto Shindo’s boundlessly melancholy The Naked Island (1960). Beyond the fact that I never would have seen a single one of them had it not been for N’s urging me to, all three films share a compactness of scope and action, as well as a kind of cinematography I can only describe as “haptic” — the woodgrain of the rustic Ohlsdorfer tabletop leaps toward your afferent neurons as tangibly as the weave of Shindo’s tatami mats or the crackling of Benicheti’s forge. And of course all three unfold in a near-wordless silence that stands as rebuke to either the necessity for or, eventually, the possibility of verbal expression.
But for me, though I’m certain Tarr would have rejected this reading of the film as far too sentimental and moralistic, the axis around which The Turin Horse pivots is an incident that takes place on the third day — after the silhouette of a fully-laden horsecart appears on the ridgeline above the hut. As this unwelcome apparition draws nearer, it becomes clear that it’s a wagon belonging to a large family of gypsies, plainly desperate for food and water. (The Ohlsdorfers’ ranting neighbor has already told us, when he staggers in on the second day, that the nearby town is no more: “the wind’s blown it away.”) When, in their thirst, these newcomers set about helping themselves to water from the well, the father sends the daughter out to chase them away — and when she fails to do so, rouses himself to follow her into the yard, cursing the strangers and menacingly brandishing the hand-axe he uses to chop kindling. The gypsies clamber onto their wagon and pull back onto the road, cacklingly chanting “Drop dead! Drop dead!” as they dwindle in the dust and distance.
Though their downward spiral into final darkness is already well underway by the time the gypsy cart first appears on the ridgeline, to me the Ohlsdorfers’ denial of even the slightest hospitality to the Other feels like a branching point: a moment things still could have happened otherwise for all concerned, and did not. Because what too late becomes clear, what neither father nor daughter have sufficient patience or goodwill to discover, is that the gypsies intended not to steal their well water, but to pay for it. (Explicitly as some compensation for what his group has taken, the old man from the wagon gives the daughter a leather book before he climbs back onto the wagon, a liturgical volume of some sort she is later seen struggling to read from phonetically.) And this exchange makes their hostility to the strangers not merely a violation of hospitality codes, but a calculated affront to human decency. I suppose you could read everything that happens to them thereafter as fulfillment of “a gypsy curse” — though it’s not explicit that father and daughter literally “drop dead” at the fade to black, the cessation of all things is unquestionably the culmination the film’s final frames are headed toward — but I prefer to interpret it as the price they pay for turning their back on care and the possibility of solidarity when other choices remained available to them.
And far more than as commemoration of Tarr’s lifework, or vindication of Krasznahorkai’s Nobel, I guess that’s why this screening of The Turin Horse felt so supremely timely to me. As I say, I’m sure Tarr would regard as unbearably twee some counterfactual version where the daughter ladles out potatoes to the newcomers instead of chasing them away, and finds the well full to brimming with clear water the next morning. No doubt he’d be right to — at least, I can’t imagine enjoying any film that saccharine and simpleminded and Mr. Rogers-righteous. But out here in reality, where the ethico-aesthetic stakes are happily somewhat different, and there are indeed howling winds picking up around all of us, I don’t think it’s so awful to carry away the idea that you care for the desperate newcomer in whatever way you’re able, for as long as you’re able, lest you find your well gone dry in the gathering dark. I’m willing to be that corny, anyway, because you know I’d rather be corny every damn day of the week than the kind of person who arms and armors their heart against the stranger.
§ Right now I'm reading [cough] a copy of Sapiens my mom’s partner gave me, well-intentionedly to be sure; listening to a bunch of Panopticon, in gleeful anticipation of seeing them in April; and rewatching both Sunshine and Ad Astra, the former to remind myself how much I love it and the latter in an attempt to dissect, more or less frame-by-frame, why just about every single choice it makes is the wrong one, at every level of the script and production.
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 157 of Sunday, 8 February 2026, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊