You will not finish this film in one sitting. Or you will, and you will not be the same body that pressed play.
Seven hours and twelve minutes. Twelve chapters. A village in the Hungarian plain, somewhere after the collapse of everything, where the rain does not stop and the mud has claimed the ground so completely that walking is a negotiation with the earth. Cows wander through the opening shot, unhurried, indifferent, and the camera watches them the way the film will watch everything that follows: with a patience so total it stops feeling like patience and starts feeling like the nature of time itself.
This is not a film you watch. It is a film you submit to. And in the submission, something happens that no shorter film can replicate. You begin to experience duration not as an aesthetic choice but as a physical fact. Your body, sitting in a chair for seven hours, starts to have opinions. Your back. Your eyes. Your restlessness. And as your body protests, you realize: this is what the characters feel. Not the plot, which is sparse and circular and almost beside the point. The weight. The sheer accumulating weight of hours that lead nowhere, that promise nothing, that arrive at the same place they departed from.
Béla Tarr once said he does not make slow films. He makes films that take the time they need. The distinction matters. Slowness implies a tempo that could be faster. Sátántangó could not be faster. Its length is not decorative. It is structural, the way the length of a winter is structural. You do not ask winter to be shorter. You endure it or you don’t.
There is a man named Irimiás. He has been gone from the village. He may be dead. Rumours circulate. Then he returns. He is charismatic and articulate and he speaks to the villagers about the future, about a collective farm, about starting over. He is, depending on your reading, a prophet, a con man, or both, and the film is not interested in resolving the ambiguity. What it is interested in is the mechanism by which hope operates on people who have nothing.
The villagers listen to Irimiás. They believe him. They pool their money. They follow him. They do this not because he is convincing but because the alternative is the mud. The rain. The bar where the accordion plays the same song and the drunks dance the same dance and the windows look out onto the same flatness. Irimiás offers a direction. In a world without landmarks, a direction is indistinguishable from salvation.
You have seen this before in different clothing. In Stalker, the Zone offered a room where your deepest wish would be granted, and the journey toward it was the film, and the arrival was the disappointment. But Tarkovsky’s pilgrims moved through a landscape charged with mystery. The Zone was dangerous because it was alive. Tarr’s plain is dangerous because it is dead. There is no Zone. There is no room. There is only Irimiás, standing in the rain, telling people that the mud will end.
Chapter eight is the one that will break you, if you are going to break.
A girl named Estike walks through the village with a cat. She is small and serious and the film gives her a chapter of her own, which is the cruellest thing it does, because a chapter of her own means a chapter of her own duration. You watch her carry the cat. You watch her in the barn. You watch her pour poison into the cat’s milk. You watch the cat drink.
The scene takes the time it takes.
Estike is not a monster. She is a child performing the only experiment available to her: the experiment of power. She has none. She has watched the adults around her exercise power through cruelty, indifference, drunkenness, exploitation. She has learned that to have power is to determine whether another living thing continues. So she determines.
Then she eats the poison herself.
If you have seen Au Hasard Balthazar, you have seen an animal carry the weight of human cruelty through a narrative that never explains itself. Bresson’s donkey absorbed the sins of everyone who touched it, silently, without appeal. Tarr inverts this. The cat does not carry Estike’s cruelty. Estike carries the village’s. She is the vessel into which every failure of care and attention has been poured, and when she breaks, she breaks quietly, in a barn, in the rain, and the camera watches because the camera always watches, and watching is not the same as intervening.
This is the chapter that makes the seven hours necessary. If Sátántangó were two hours long, Estike’s death would be a dramatic event. It would have the shape of a climax. It would mean something within a structure that awards meaning to suffering. But at seven hours, after four chapters of mud and rain and drunken repetition, Estike’s death does not arrive as a climax. It arrives as weather. It arrives the way things arrive in places where no one is paying attention. Not with a crescendo but with the soft click of something closing that was never properly opened.
The structure of the film is a tango. Six steps forward, six steps back. The chapters overlap, revisit the same events from different angles, double back on themselves. You see a scene in chapter three and then see it again in chapter five from across the street, and the same event looks different because you are different. You have accumulated hours. Your eyes have adjusted. You are, whether you wanted to be or not, a resident now.
This is what seven hours does that nothing else can do. It makes you a local.
When you watch a ninety-minute film, you are a tourist. You arrive, you see the sights, you leave with an impression. When you watch Sátántangó, the impression gives way to something thicker. You know the sound of the rain on the windows of the bar. You know the cadence of the accordion. You know the distance between the houses because you have walked it, in real time, with the camera. You do not have opinions about this village. You have memories of it.
This is the film’s gift, and it is not a comfortable one. The memories are of ugliness, pettiness, decay, institutional failure, environmental collapse, the small violences people inflict on each other when there is nothing else to do. You remember these things the way you remember a bad winter. Not with the clarity of narrative but with the dull ache of time spent.
There is a doctor. He is fat and drunk and he sits by his window and watches the village and writes everything down in notebooks. He is the film’s stand-in for the audience, which is a joke Tarr is making at your expense. The doctor watches. He records. He does not intervene. He is, in the economy of the film, a critic. A man who believes that observation is a form of participation.
It is not.
The doctor’s notebooks are meticulous. His attention is genuine. But when Estike dies, his notebooks do not save her. When the villagers are swindled, his records do not protect them. Watching is not enough. Writing it down is not enough. The film knows this about itself. It knows that seven hours of watching a village collapse is, in the end, seven hours of not doing anything about it. And it implicates you in this knowledge because you, too, have been watching. You, too, have been taking notes. You, too, have been sitting by the window.
In Come and See, Klimov forced the viewer into identification so total that Florya’s face became your face, his horror your horror. Tarr does not offer that mercy. He does not let you become a character. He keeps you at the distance of the doctor, the distance of the window, the distance of a camera that follows and follows and follows but never reaches. You are close enough to see everything and too far away to touch anything.
The final image of Sátántangó is a man boarding up a window.
The doctor, having followed the villagers on their failed exodus and returned to his house alone, begins to seal himself in. He nails boards across the window through which he has observed the village for the entire film. The light narrows. The frame darkens. And then there is nothing.
Every film ends in darkness. The screen goes black. The projector stops. But Sátántangó makes the darkness active. It makes the darkness a choice. The window is boarded up from the inside. The observer has decided that there is nothing left to observe. The record is closed.
You sit in the dark after the film ends, and you are aware of something you were not aware of seven hours ago. Not a thought. Not an insight. Not a theme you can summarize. Something more bodily than that. A heaviness. A specific gravity to the hours you have spent in the rain with these people, in this mud, in this country that no longer believes its own name. You cannot describe what the film did to you because what it did to you is not an event. It is an accumulation.
Sátántangó does not change your mind about anything. It changes your body’s relationship to time. After seven hours in the Hungarian plain, ordinary duration feels different. A cup of coffee takes as long as it takes. A walk to the corner is a walk to the corner. The rain, if it is raining, is not atmosphere. It is rain. And you stand in it, and you remember the cows at the beginning, and the accordion, and the girl with the cat, and the man who boarded up the window, and you think: I lived there, for a while. I lived in that film. I did not visit it.
I lived there.