After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Sure it's supposed to be boring and make you wanna kill yourself whilst watching it but i dont care. a movie doesnt become automatically good if it did what it wanted to do

The movie begins with a plane of a horse pulling a cart that lasts four minutes twenty seconds, The amount of things that must count! No, it does not count anything that has not been counted in the first five seconds and would be long.This type of films that, because some critics say, have to go to the history of cinema, I hope they never get to do it. Because the truth is that history, the film has little.I would give just as much as thirty planes or five hundred, the problem is that the planes tell nothing. Once you have counted the first day, the rest is repeated. If he had done a short, surely it would have been the short of his life, but it is that each thing has its own.That obsession with making plans sequences in which the camera moves alone, without following anything, to tell anything, there are times when it leaves things totally dark or flat and you do not see what happens, if anything happens.We would say that the actors are fine, if they are great, the truth is that they are very well, and they get to do their role for two and a half hours, only their role does not have much to say.The photograph is beautiful, it gets you into that world, but in a few minutes you are bored.I do not think this movie is a movie, I would say that it does not reach a movie

My initial reaction to the film is "here is a black and white movie, well made, sombre in spirit that takes off from the event that led to Nietzsche's eventual death." The famous nihilist, Nietzsche, who once studied to be a monk and then denounced the existence of God, ultimately went mad after he saw a horse being brutalized by a horse- cart owner when the horse stubbornly refused to pull the cart. This movie "The Turin Horse" is all about stubborn lives as well in a stubborn world.The wind blows relentlessly in a barren spot in Hungary. A partly paralyzed father and his daughter live in a house built of stones and tiles far away from any living soul with an aging horse.Director Tarr builds up a highly unreal story. The duo survives day after day on potatoes, possibly grown on the farm and some distilled liquor, possibly homemade. They live on water from a well that dries up. Could anyone live on potatoes, water and liquor for days on end?They do not appear to have a survival instinct or worry about their future. The stubborn horse refuses to eat, and kind daughter follows the horse's actions--by refusing to eat. Even lamps full of oil refuse to light up. How the daughter and horse are similar visually towards the end is remarkably achieved by Tarr and his team.The music and camera-work are laudable. So are the performances of humans and animals. The nihilism is all pervasive. It contaminates the viewer, for no logical reason. Tarr has misplaced talent similar to Miklos Jansco, whom I have interviewed 33 years ago. I love many Hungarian films--especially those of Zoltan Fabri (whom I had interviewed as well) and Istvan Szabo-- that are world class. Yet despite the high class production details, I cannot relate with the two Tarr films I have seen thus far--this one and "Werckmeister Harmonies."

I finally watched The Turin Horse recently. I had been meaning to get around to it for a long time. After seeing Damnation, which just didn't really click with me, I think I may have have subconsciously lowered The Turin Horse's priority level in my viewing schedule. However, the movie really worked for me. The last couple nights I couldn't sleep because I couldn't stop thinking about it. I never seemed to ever drift fully into sleep. I would kind of doze off, still thinking about it, only to quickly be aroused by my own thoughts and immediately struggle to try to fall back asleep. The film was in many ways similar to Jeanne Dielman. It shows the overwhelming claustrophobia of a daily routine. How just making it through the basic chores necessary to live can be almost unbearable. It could become impossible to accomplish anything more, let alone find a way to assign some sort of meaning to our lives. But beyond that, it also had a significant underlying theme about class systems and a certain ease of life which allows us to become intellectuals. Nietzsche had the luxury of being destroyed by his own philosophy. He had the luxury of feeling sympathy for the beaten horse. However, when that very horse is your livelihood and the ability to make it through life is barely possible and completely reliant upon that animal's compliance, the abstract philosophies sort of fade away. Sometimes the harsh realities of the world nullify philosophy. Even if it was coming from the "right" place. There is a Louis C.K. joke in which he talks about the fact that he doesn't believe in hitting his children, even though his mother used to hit him. He notes that the difference is that he is wealthy and his mother wasn't. She couldn't afford the luxury of the moral high ground. She was tired and needed the most immediately effective option available. The same concept applies to the farmer's situation with the horse. In neither C.K.'s joke nor in Béla Tarr's film is this a justification. It is simply revealing that life is more complicated than our philosophies allow for. The final aspect of the film which mystifies me are the meta-cinematic elements. The film is a bleak, pessimistic, and starkly final film. It is in many ways an antithesis to the slight beacons of hope offered in his earlier films. It is a film about giving up. Which is exactly what Tarr has done. He's given up making films. The horse quits working, eating, and living. The girl eventually gives up living. Even the earth appears to have given up. Life is over. The sun refuses to shine, lamps refuse to light, water wells refuse to give water. Tarr refuses to make more movies. There is nothing left to say. Philosophy is dead. Cinema is over. They've been snuffed out by what Tarr calls "the heaviness of human existence." All that remains is existing in a void of meaninglessness. However, even that seems nearly finished.