The Turin Horse

Almost nothing seems to happen in The Turin Horse. Against every expectation I brought to it, I came to love it more than any other modern film.

The Turin Horse (2011), Béla Tarr's final feature film, opens with a familiar story. In January 1889, in Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche saw a cabman flogging a horse that refused to move. He rushed to the animal, embraced its neck, wept, and then collapsed. For the final decade of his life, he lived in near-total silence. "Of the horse," the narrator concludes, "we know nothing." The film enters precisely that unknown.

The film follows six days on a windswept plain. A farmer with a withered arm, his daughter, and the horse repeat the same spare routine: waking, dressing, drawing water, boiling two potatoes, eating by hand, and sleeping. The wind never relents. Then the world begins to recede: the horse stops eating, the well runs dry, and the lamps will not light. The end comes not as fire but as exhaustion, quietly taking one thing after another.

At first I expected to be bored: the film runs for two and a half hours and is shot in black and white. Instead, the repetition I had dreaded began to draw me in. Around the third boiled potato, I realized I was no longer waiting for a plot. What held me was simpler and more serious: two people performing the small ritual of staying alive. I found it almost unbearably moving.

The film left me with questions it refuses to answer. What happened to the well? Did the visitors poison it, throw stones into it, or did the earth simply stop holding water? Who was the man buying brandy, and why did he speak as if the world had already ended? Why did the daughter leave her potato untouched on the final evening? Did the horse die, or give up the wish to live? Above all, why remain on that plain? The longer I considered these questions, the more deliberate the silence seemed. That restraint, not any possible explanation, is what I came to love.

One moment gathers those questions into a single image. They load a cart, climb the hill, and leave the frame, abandoning their home. Soon they return without explanation. I first assumed that the travelers seen at the well had forced them back. Then I understood that there was nowhere to go: the wind rules both sides of the hill. That brief, defeated journey remains the truest image of despair I know. It is not a scream or a collapse, but the quiet discovery that every exit leads back to the same room.

I spend my days building systems that learn through repetition, extracting structure through repeated exposure to similar examples. The Turin Horse unsettled me because it reverses that premise. In Tarr's film, repetition yields neither knowledge nor mastery. It wears life down until the same daily gestures signify endurance rather than progress. Watching that erosion, I understood something reasoning alone had not shown me: the dignity of a life rests less in what it accumulates than in the fact that it continues, against a wind that never relents.

The film consists of just 30 long shots. Tarr described it as a study of the "heaviness of human existence": not strictly despair, but weight. I have come to believe it holds both. I return to it like a piece of music too sorrowful to play often but too true to abandon. Of the horse we know nothing. Yet for two and a half hours, Tarr seats us beside it, leaves every question unanswered, and gives us nowhere to go. Against all reason, that is enough.