Six years after his monumental Sátántangó, one of the key works of the 1990s and a film that will become a reference point for anyone wanting to understand post-communist Eastern Europe, Béla Tarr returns with Werckmeister Harmonies, another transcendent allegory that bears his unmistakable stamp. Turning to a book that bears the beautiful title The Melancholy of Resistance, written by his longtime collaborator and scriptwriter, László Krasznahorkai, Tarr again traverses the territory of empty lives, alcoholic evenings, and muddy roads. The story is set in a remote Hungarian town whose quiet desolation is disturbed by an outsider who touches on the locals’ frustrations with uncanny prescience.