Watch The Turin Horse For Free

Pretty Good

Good concept, poorly executed.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

I guess I don't understand art and should stick to playing Call of Duty games or watching whatever movie Michael Bay comes up with next while he's masturbating to nuclear bomb footage. I really don't understand the praise for this film, it's as if watching the same events over and over again is appealing. I get it, Tarr is making a point about the repetitive and boring lives of these characters. I get it, this isn't supposed to be a fun movie. I get it, I just don't think it's as important as people think it is. Nobody likes to listen to the same soundtrack on loop. Nobody *should* enjoy watching someone eat a potato with his hands in at least three separate scenes. Most importantly, nobody should get the idea that this film is some amazingly shot masterpiece because it does a lot of long takes. Nothing of value goes on in these scenes until over an hour into the film. The dialogue is simple enough that anybody can do it (and these actors still struggle to convincingly pull off their lines), and anybody can cut wood and wash clothes in front of a camera for 2 and a half minutes. Sure the scenes involving the horse took talent and a trained horse to do, but if a scene of a horse is what I'm supposed to look forward to the fvck that sh!t. Movies like "Hard to be A God" and "the Tribe" have long take scenes that actually have things going on in them, like dialogue or multiple things happening on screen, which makes their one takes impressive. And don't even try to compare this to the hour and a half long single take movie "Victoria". Here, the one take feels overly long and dull. Maybe I'm just easily bored. I know this director isn't for everyone, but to me this movie feels like it is meant for people who enjoy monotony to a sadistic extent. At 2 and a half hours this begins to feel more like a waterboarding session than an art-film viewing. The philosophy here is weak and bare bones. The characters here are unfleshed out and bare bones. This movie is bare bones. Skip it for any other art film on your list

Girl:What it is Papa? Father:I don't know.. It is my first Bela Tarr movie and I don't think that words can help me to write a review on 'The Turin Horse' and it is my first review. I have been watching movies since my childhood, reading literature and philosophy in order to understand human condition but the visual and sound sensation I have had with 'The Turin Horse' is matchless. There is a modern novel in which a girl commits suicide because she think that she had to brush her teeth everyday with the same brush. Bela Tarr's characters are eating raw potatoes everyday,fortunately they don't commit suicide but what is the point in living? Bela will compel you to think about it. Father: Eat. we have to... To be very honest 'The Turin Horse' is the most powerful work of cinematic art I've ever came across, it is not social but ontological rather cosmological. What it is to be human? Want to know? Go and watch it, the 'heaviness of human existence' to put it in Bela's words.

A film like The Turin Horse makes me feel a little stupid. Perhaps I am just not 'getting' it, as apparently most critics did when they saw the film - presumably, according to the director (still in his 50's) his last). And it's not like I came to this filmmaker ignorant of his craft and style; sitting through all 450 minutes of Satantango was one of the most mysterious, satisfying if strange filmmaking experiences I've ever had, and that was not without its stretches of time without much "going on" as it were in the usual narrative sense.The idea with The Turin Horse, co-directed by Agnes Hranitzszky, is that Frederich Nietzche saved a horse from being whipped in a town square in the late 19th century, and the horse was removed from its owner and given to another. Tarr could have filmed that sequence - which happened in real life, and further sounds to me like the dream sequence from Crime & Punishment involving a whipped horse, certainly from the opening narration a very cinematic and dramatic turn of events - but he chooses to go right into the story of this old farmer bringing the horse to his tiny not-much-of-a-farm with his daughter, and watch over the course of five/six days their downfall.The thing you should know going into this, if you haven't seen Tarr before, is that he does long takes. All the time. Maybe the shortest shot in this runtime is about 4 minutes. It's certainly not easy to pull this off, everything has to be choreographed and timed just right, and that is certainly a testament to Fred Kinemen's cinematography. For me, actually, if it's anyone's masterpiece it's Kinemen's, who in black and white and usually in a camera that moves, gets the dust and wind and darkness and despair down just right visually speaking. There are many shots in the film, like the one where the farmer and his daughter, in the one sort of moment of story "progression", tries to get away from the farm to somewhere else, and the camera shows them off on the hillside, with a dead, lonely tree up top, and the wind blowing in the foreground. I can't fault visually speaking how it looks - just what is put into it, the content.But why then say that this movie makes me feel 'stupid'? I sensed there was a greater, more profound message here, and I didn't 'get' it, I guess. Perhaps there's something to be said for this being some sort of transcendental experience or other, that what the movie is pretty much 'about' - the pitiless routines of cooking food, fetching water from a well, trying to make a horse eat, putting on clothes - is supposed to make us hypnotized. The sort of real-time, meditative, sort of deadpan and minimalist filmmaking of Satantango had that too, as I'm sure Tarr's other films do, but there was more going on there, more to actual see and note in the characters. Maybe that's part of the point, that this farmer and his daughter, without any electricity or books (well, until a gypsy happens to give one to her, not a long story, they happen by the house in one of the only times other humans interact with them) or any curiosity past living from one day to the next, have made this life and eventual death for themselves. And I can be mesmerized watching routine; Jeanne Dielman is one of the highlights of 1970's French cinema.So what's missing here? Is it missing in myself to not meet the material more than halfway? I don't know. There may be something that Nietzsche is used as this catalyst for the story at all - that there's something to these lives 'Between Good and Evil', or to his philosophy expressed here. Maybe it's about how the breakdown of the world is meant to be comparable to Tarr seeing the breakdown of cinema, with himself leaving the medium (at least for the time being). And to be fair, as more 'things' happen to this father and daughter, I started to get more intrigued. I wanted to meet the film more than halfway, as this director is the epitome of uncompromising, dead-serious art house filmmakers. And there's just enough for me to recommend it to die-hard admirers of this sort of rigorous filmmaking with maybe like 50 shots in the whole run time. I simply wish there had been a sliver more 'there' there in terms of these two people, despite that being the point of the nothingness of existence and so on.

Movies often afford us the opportunity to experience things we otherwise would not experience in our own lifetimes. We can live many lifetimes through movies. Movies are an art form and a great film is one that is an involving experience that is real, let's you live and breathe the experience depicted in the film. Bela Tarr is a great film maker who has shown us some very realistic and impacting imagery in his films.The message of this film is that life is a struggle, often tedious and boring, and sometimes unjust. The film is boring as you live the lives in the movie, because the movie depicts life as boring. The film is great from an artistic vantage because it enables you to live the tediousness. You live in a hard world where the greatest pleasure is looking out of a window to view a desolate environment. But the film makes you feel such desolation, tediousness, loneliness, and hardship.There is very little dialog except for one monologue by a visitor in which he ventilates his frustrations with the problems in the world, in an abstract and disorganized manner. But this corresponds to the main message of the film.The artistic value of the film is in providing the viewer with a realistic experience. However, this experience is not fun, exciting, action-packed, or need-fulfilling, and that will turn off most viewers.