There’s art-house, and then there’s The Turin Horse. Upon completion of this film, Hungarian maestro Bela Tarr declared it would be his last. While film directors cannot always be trusted when they say they’re done making movies, The Turin Horse does feel like the end of a career. In fact, it feels like the end of the world.
An old man and his daughter live in a house in the middle of nowhere. Howling winds and extreme cold make life impossible. They are grinded down by poverty, and a mind-numbing routine. They check on their horse, who has stopped eating and refuses to work. They get dressed. They fetch water from the well. For dinner? Potatoes. Boiled potatoes, every damn day. All these activities are completed with immense difficulty. They go to bed knowing tomorrow will be roughly the same, just a little harder. Nothing is worth looking forward to.
Bela Tarr’s inspiration was the famous anecdote about the last lucid day in the life of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. As the opening narration in the film tells us, in 1889, Nietzsche saw a horse being whipped. Distraught, he flung his arms around the horse, and then collapsed. Nietzsche went mad and lived for another 11 years. What happened to the horse, we’ll never know.
The Turin Horse imagines the horse’s (though strictly speaking, we never know if this particular horse had anything to do with Nietzsche) last miserable days. But his two care-takers are really the ones who are beaten down by life – grinded down until nothing is left of their spirit. The film is shot in exquisite black and white – and it's difficult to imagine it any other way. There can be no colour in the lives of these people. At times, there isn’t even any white, just black.
The film is likely to be unlike any you’ve seen before, but be warned – it’s a bit close to gazing into an abyss.
