Movie Review – The Turin Horse

The Turin Horse (2011)
Written by László Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr
Directed by Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky

The world is dying. The world will die. This has been the world’s fate since before humans stood upright and began their intellectual evolution. The Turin Horse is a film about the brutal toil it is to be alive in this world, to experience death at all times, and to be able to do nothing about it. The world is going to die whether we are here for it or not. Eventually, billions of years from now, our sun will expand as it goes into its death throes and consume the inner worlds of our solar system. That is beyond the macro view; that is the omni view. On a smaller scale, we have the perpetuation of our species. Will one of us be able to observe this solar gargantuan devour our old homeworld from a safe distance, our species spread out across the Milky Way? That is something that feels very uncertain at this point in our history.

A hellish wind rips across the Great Hungarian Plain. A coach driver leads his aging horse back home to his farm. His daughter emerges and helps put up the beast and the wagon. She helps her father out of his work clothes and into his home clothes. She boils potatoes for dinner. They eat in silence. The day passes into night. A new day begins. The daughter fetches two pails of water from the well. The horse refuses to pull the wagon. A few minutes of trying leads to them giving up. The day passes. Another day passes. Another. Another. Occasionally, some variant: a distant neighbor stops by for a drink, the longest monologue in a near dialogue-absent film, telling them the village is gone. They don’t believe him. A band of Roma stop by, dying of thirst, and driven away. They leave the girl a book. Tarr has called it an anti-Bible. The darkness is coming. It does not care if you are ready or not.

The Turin Horse emerged from Tarr’s conversation with his writing collaborator László Krasznahorkai. Krasznahorkai was sharing an apocryphal story about the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This story is recited by the narrator at the start of the film. It goes that Nietzsche left his home one morning and encountered a coach driver whose horse stubbornly refused to move. The driver lost his temper and began beating, savaging the animal. Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse and broke down. He sobbed and was inconsolable. His neighbor took him home, where Nietzsche uttered his final words: “Mutter, ich bin dumm” (Mother, I am stupid). He lived for another ten years in silent insanity. 

On hearing this story, Tarr replied, “What happened to the horse?” The Turin Horse became a project he tinkered with for over twenty years. When it was released, Tarr proclaimed this was his final film and has made good on that oath for thirteen years and counting. I don’t expect he will be back unless some new project comes to mind that compels him more than he is focused on now. For a filmmaker so focused on revolutions and things coming full circle, The Turin Horse represents a type of completion. It showcases the technique he’d mastered over his career and brings all his themes together in a very deceivingly simple manner.

Broken into six parts covering six days, the film comprises only 30 shots in two and a half hours. There’s no plot, no character arcs. The one constant throughout every scene is the wind. It never stops blowing. The wind cuts through in the heavy silence of yet another meal of boiled potatoes. It’s like the howl of God shaking the foundations of the Earth. Our two main characters do not react. They keep trudging forward, accepting the brutality of nature on them. What we see these characters do the most is sit in a chair in front of the window and stare out, their faces holding nothing but a tired sort of pain. 

On day two, the neighbor visits for some brandy and rambles on about everything in the world collapsing. A few days later, the Roma arrive, and the girl is given a book. The most dialogue she has is during the scene where she sits and reads aloud to herself. The words from the book and the words of the neighbor emphasize the same thing—the world is falling apart, and it is both the fault of humanity and God. 

Strange signs signal the end of the natural world. The bark beetles stop gnawing away at the frame of the house. The horse refuses to work and then won’t eat. The well dries up. This last event causes the man to have his daughter pack things up. They will leave. They get the handcart, and the horse agrees to follow, not lead. The camera stays close to the house as the trio reaches a hill in the distance. A leafless tree sits on top. They suddenly turn around at the hill’s peak, return home, and put everything away. Whatever they saw over the ridge seemed to tell them there was nowhere to go.

At every turn, Tarr refuses to progress things. We are trapped in the circle, each day barely differentiated from the next. What is being lost is the only thing that really helps us know the difference. We reach a point where the water has been used up, and the two are forced to eat raw potatoes. You see the disgust on the old man’s face, perhaps tears. The reality of this situation is calcifying in him. The days of a decently passing meal seem to be gone. You cannot live without water. 

The most chilling moments happen in the final minutes of the picture as the sun’s light goes away. We are enveloped in darkness, the only light coming from a candle, which even then stops working. This is the anti-Genesis. God has spoken and said let there be darkness. With the six-day structure, we can say this is Creation’s end. Tarr has given us an undeniable apocalypse. His other films have shown humanity decaying, but this is the end of all things. What’s so striking about that is how little emotion our characters show. The apocalypse is not a sudden explosion but a slow, winding circle down into the bowels of Hell. You don’t even realize what is happening by the time you get there.

Tarr has made a film about the ultimate incoherence of how we live. Our routines and our perspectives are based on reality that isn’t true. We force pieces of the natural world to fit our demands. I look at footage of the U.S. Eastern coast and into the Appalachian Mountains and see communities experiencing what nature can do. In these moments, those apocryphal words of Nietzsche ring so true, “ Mother, I am stupid.”Like Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, this is the story of the realization of the end. People live without thinking, and then the perspective shifts suddenly. It’s too late to do anything other than embrace the void.