The apocalyptic impulse of Tarr’s late films finds its fullest expression in his celebrated epic ambiguously structured around the collapse of a remote collective farm and the arrival of a strange messiah figure determined to either save or sacrifice the community to an unknown cause. The bravura tracking shot which opens Satantango following a dramatic tide of cattle pouring out across a ramshackle hamlet, introduces nature and the animal kingdom as main protagonists and mysterious voices of the dark animism explored throughout the film’s hypnotic seven-and-a-half-hour span. Describing a peasant land seemingly trapped out of time, Satantango is a grand expression of the post-industrial primitivism at the heart of Tarr and Kraznahorkai’s vision, a dizzying neo-Brueghelism. – Haden Guest