A reclusive loner yearns for a married cabaret singer working at the local Titanic Bar and manages to temporarily remove her husband from the picture so he can pursue his obsession. Damnation’s endless rain and aura of despair, its stray dogs and dilapidated mining town, recall Tarkovsky while its rumination on solitude and misery— portrayed at the inexorably glacial pace of existential anomie—announce Tarr’s singular directorial voice. “The near miracle is that something so compulsively watchable can be made out of a setting and society that seem so depressive and petrified” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).