"Silent Light."

By David Hudson on 01/07/2009

"Carlos Reygadas's visceral cinematic sensibility can be felt in every frame of 'Silent Light,' briefly showcased at New York's MoMA last fall and already cropping up on numerous critical year-end lists (mine included)." Kristi Mitsuda for indieWIRE: "It receives wider US exposure starting this week at Gotham's Film Forum, thankfully: As with all of the Mexican filmmaker's works, it demands to be seen on the big screen; only an immersive theatrical setting can do justice to such complex visual and aural textures, painstakingly planned camera movements, and sensitivity to light."

"At its basest level, 'Silent Light' is a film about the gulf between what we can explain (based on evidence and experience and a common language for things that happen to all people) and things we can't, things which push our understanding of the way the universe works and what it means to be a part of it," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Like any number of visually extraordinary epics about big ideas which open up new avenues of interpretation on each viewing ('2001' is the example that, perhaps oddly, comes quickest to my mind), words are not always its best advertisements."

Scott Foundas in the Voice: "Coming on the heels of the elephant-dung Jesus that was 2005's 'Battle in Heaven,' this austere, astonishingly beautiful drama of marital and spiritual crisis, set in a modern-day Mennonite community, seems more the work of a confident young master than that of an impish enfant terrible. I spoke with the 37-year-old filmmaker when he passed through New York for the 2007 New York Film Festival."

The New York Times runs Manohla Dargis's review from September.

Updated through 1/8.

Updates, 1/8: "Many have called 'Silent Light' an extended homage to Carl Dreyer's 1955 transcendentalist classic 'Ordet,' but the differences are telling," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Both films are set in isolation among the religiously devout, and both close with a moment of divine grace that unmistakably connects the two movies. But where Dreyer's world is narrow, suffocating, and punishingly austere - not that there's anything wrong with that - Reygadas often proves himself a sensualist with more in common with Terrence Malick than Dreyer."

"The style that predominates in current high-art festival films - films that rarely get much exposure in US movie houses - is minimalist." Mary Corliss for Time: "Springing from the works of great directors like Carl-Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson, it follows certain rules, as restrictive as Mennonite edicts. Pare movie technique down to its essentials; show characters behaving, however mutely, rather than acting; make viewers work for their epiphanies. This style has been responsible for many small, lugubrious films and - from directors who know how to make more of less - a few masterpieces. Silent Light is one of them."

"I don't know how in the world Reygadas recruited Mennonites from the Mexican state of Chihuahua - where about 50,000 Plautdietsch-speakers still hang on - to act in his film," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Regardless, the results are astonishing.... There's a scene when Johan and his children go for a swim, clad in Mennonite long underwear, in their homemade outdoor pool that's among the most gorgeous things I've ever seen in a motion picture. It isn't fiction but also isn't exactly documentary, and it has a passion and mystery and immanent vitality that, for my money, outstrips the film's somewhat forced conclusion."

"A healthy degree of skepticism is automatically called for whenever words like 'elegiac' or 'magisterial' crop up, and 'Silent Light' is nothing if not determinedly and successfully magisterial," writes Vadim Rizov in the Auteurs' Notebook; "when I talked to Dan Sallitt about it, he noted it felt like being in a cathedral, which is dead-on. This would seem to be form matching content: 'Silent Light' is a tale of devout Mennonites, and two miracles - one minor, one major - occur. Based on Reygadas's other films, 'Japón' and 'Battle in Heaven,' though, 'Silent Light's nods towards religion seem like a function of its story, rather than any sign of devout respect (or real interest in same) on Reygadas's part. Hence why I'm unconvinced."

For James van Maanen, "the entire movie seems a bit like a play-on-something-or-other because, when this viewer, at least, encounters a Reygadas movie, there is always a missing link: The whole refuses to coalesce."

Julián Hernández is "Mexico's finest filmmaker with the greatest human touch," argues Armond White in the New York Press, "which may be why his masterpieces 'Broken Sky' and 'A Thousand Clouds of Peace' have gone uncelebrated. Humanism is critically unpopular among art snobs. Art snobs prefer the noncommittal mystification that Reygadas applies to the sex lives of his benighted characters."

Tags: Carlos Reygadas