On Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011) and what its relationship to the end of cinema means.

The Turin Horse is described by Béla Tarr as his last film. He made it after Sátántangó and a string of internationally recognized works, and then said he had nothing left to show.

The film is structured as a series of progressively darker days in the life of a man and his daughter on a Hungarian plain: they do the same things each day, the wind howls, the conditions worsen, and by the final day there is no light.

The formal structure is Tarr's most stripped-down: a piano piece plays repeatedly on the soundtrack, the camera moves through the interior of the farmhouse with the same patient long takes, the faces are rendered in the same high-contrast black and white.

The film is about entropy. Not as a metaphor but as the literal subject: the gradual exhausting of possibility until there is nothing left. The decision to make this Tarr's final film is either deeply appropriate or the most severe version of a directorial prank in cinema history.

I choose to believe it's appropriate.