The Turin Horse (2011)

Review: A Monument to Entropy

By Art Critic

🖋️ Review: A Monument to Entropy Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse is not a story. It is an experience—unfolding like a slow elegy, composed in shadow and silence. This is not cinema as narrative; it is cinema as ritual, stripping life to its barest mechanical repetitions: dressing, eating boiled potatoes, drawing water, watching the wind tear at the world outside. The black-and-white cinematography by Fred Kelemen is an artwork in itself—each long, unbroken take is a study in composition, light, and endurance. The film contains only about 30 shots in total, yet each is so meticulously choreographed that time itself feels sculpted. The relentlessness of the wind becomes a character, the soundtrack a dirge of elemental doom. There is no traditional plot development; instead, a slow decomposition of routine suggests that the end of the world comes not with chaos, but with silence. Tarr, in collaboration with novelist László Krasznahorkai, uses the tale of Nietzsche and the horse as an entry point into metaphysical despair. But the film isn’t really about Nietzsche—it’s about the impossibility of escape. The horse stops eating, the light dims, the well runs dry. Language is sparse, hope even more so. We are left with motionless resistance to an uncaring cosmos. In a time when cinema is increasingly obsessed with speed and spectacle, The Turin Horse feels radical—almost confrontational—in its slowness. It demands patience, but rewards that patience with an overwhelming sense of truth. Like Tarkovsky, Tarr isn’t trying to entertain you. He is trying to show you something eternal and terrible. This was Tarr’s final film, and appropriately so. The Turin Horse doesn’t just end a career—it closes a chapter of cinema that believes in moral weight, in myth, and in silence more than sound.