THE TURIN HORSE (Béla Tarr)

A father and his daughter live in isolation in a stone house in the middle of nowhere, battered for days by a relentless wind. Each day, they repeat the same gestures: dressing in layers of clothing, eating potatoes with salt, walking a few meters to the well or to check on their horse, which has fallen into a kind of apathy; they return home and undress; the father needs his daughter’s help to do so. Resources begin to disappear. The world does not collapse all at once: it slowly fades out.

The film begins with an anecdote: in 1889, in Turin, Nietzsche witnessed a coachman beating his horse. The philosopher approached the animal in tears, embraced it, and collapsed. After that moment, he never wrote again. He withdrew from the world, and his thinking faded into a silence that would last until his death ten years later.

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In 2011, when I was studying film in Mexico City, I used to go to the Cineteca Nacional the way one goes somewhere to take shelter from the noise. It wasn’t the polished, functional space it is today, so similar to any commercial cinema. Back then, it still had something of a cult atmosphere, an independent territory, even a bit rough around the edges. There were no popcorn combos or giant sodas, and the word “experience” had not yet been turned into merchandise. You went there to watch films, nothing more. Or at least that’s what we believed.

One afternoon, some friends from film school and I heard that an important Hungarian director would be presenting his latest film. We decided to go more out of curiosity than devotion. The name Béla Tarr meant nothing to us. None of us could have explained who he was or what kind of cinema he made. Still, the theater was full, as if everyone else knew something we didn’t.

Tarr appeared, said only a few words—the necessary ones—presented The Turin Horse, and left. There were no warnings.

From the first minutes, something began to shift. It wasn’t only the slow rhythm, which we already knew from other films. It was something else: the wind that never stopped blowing, the repeated gestures, the almost nonexistent dialogue. A piece of music returning again and again, deep and insistent, as if someone were praying without words. More than watching the film, I felt that the film was watching me. Time stopped moving forward and began turning on itself. A kind of hypnosis. An experience strangely similar to entering a church without faith, but with respect.

When it ended, nobody stood up right away. The theater remained suspended in a strange mixture of fascination and bewilderment, like after a silence that has lasted too long. Then one of the attendees—an older man, with the kind of body that seems to have seen much before speaking—took the microphone. Clearly moved, he began praising Tarr without measure, without irony, without embarrassment. And he finished with a sentence that would stay with us for years, repeated between laughter and confusion, but also with a grain of truth:

“Mr. Béla Tarr, I place you on my altar.”

Something had already been marked there, even if we didn’t fully realize it.

In the days that followed, his other films were screened. I saw a couple of them. Among them was Sátántangó, which I watched with my friend Esteban. It wasn’t only the duration—seven and a half hours that seemed endless—but the sensation Tarr’s cinema produces when one tries too hard to understand it: at first it feels like an intellectual exercise, almost a test of endurance, but little by little something loosens. The film refuses to be fully thought; instead, it slowly wears you down.

As a curious detail—though at the time it didn’t feel that way—about twenty people entered the theater with us. As the hours passed, the group gradually thinned out. Quiet exits, returns that never happened. When the film finally ended, only five of us remained. Among them was the same man who, days earlier, had taken the microphone after The Turin Horse and said: “Mr. Béla Tarr, I place you on my altar.”

In that slow wearing down, without noticing it, one begins to share the fragility of the characters. And when we left the theater, the wind was still blowing, yes—but it was no longer the same wind as before we had entered.

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Through a postmodern lens, it may be tempting to read The Turin Horse as a fable about animal rights. But it soon becomes clear that there are no rights here, no laws, not even a moral framework to hold on to. What exists instead are conditions—material, irreversible conditions. From there, Béla Tarr shifts the discussion: the question is not about deciding freely, but about surviving within what one is given.

The film constructs a tri-dependent relationship between the father, the daughter, and the horse. None of them functions alone. Every gesture sustains the others. If one fails, the entire order cracks. To this fragility is added the constant storm: the wind that never relents, not as metaphor but as a physical force, something concrete that crosses the bodies and organizes the world.

The few—or nonexistent—words are unsettling for a Western culture accustomed to explaining, naming, and negotiating everything. When the father returns after facing the wind, one expects the usual: a greeting, a complaint, a minimal phrase to frame the scene. None of that happens. That sense of what “should be” runs through our perception and begins to fail. The film insists on putting it into crisis.

Nothing is omitted here. At least not in terms of time. If something happens, we see it. If someone does something, we accompany the full duration of the gesture. There are no ellipses to relieve us. Leaving the house means every door, every step, every button. Tarr does not romanticize boredom, nor does he propose a “well-lived life” in the liberal sense. He forces us simply to remain. To stop expecting entertainment. To endure.

Actions repeat themselves, yes—but never in the same way. Each repetition advances a little further toward annihilation.

Nature appears as a character, even as an antagonist, but never from an idealized place. It is neither wise nor just: it erodes. It consumes. It wears things down with time. And that is where time ceases to be a productive unit and becomes an existential question. What sense is there in repeating rituals and routines when everything seems condemned to exhaustion?

The first line of dialogue comes around the twentieth minute. The daughter says, “It’s ready.” On the table there are boiled potatoes. Nothing more.

The ritual repeats. Darkness grows denser. Poverty is never beautified.

The empathy the film proposes is not idealized; it is embodied. An empathy that messes up your hair, that chills you, that makes you feel the wind pressing against your bones. Sensations that only time can transmit.

It is not by chance that the first to break is the horse. Nature recognizes the absurd sooner.

The wind remains the true protagonist. Every day begins with the hope that it will stop, that the sun will appear. The opposite happens.

When the storm finally ends, on the sixth day—the same six days in which, according to the biblical story, God created the world—the narrator speaks of a deadly silence. There is no celebration. They eat potatoes as always. Time continues. Father and daughter remain motionless, facing each other, like a photograph. We know it is not one only because the body, inevitably, must blink.

In the middle of nowhere, in such a hostile place, the question arises by itself: how did they get there? Tarr is not interested in answering. The story closes itself within those six days and then lets them continue—with their lives, with their time, with that wind which, even when it stops, has already changed the way of being in the world.

A Torinói ló (Béla Tarr, 2011)