Silent Light (Licht Silenciosa)

This is a deeply considered and unexpectedly gripping film from a director making a giant leap into the first rank of world cinema. On finally fading to black, it leaves behind on the blank screen, as if on the inside of a closed eyelid, a shimmering sense of having looked into something overwhelmingly powerful.

Moving with unforced, almost geological slowness, Reygadas establishes the setting for a tale of forbidden love in a rural Dutchdialect- speaking community in Mexico. Johan (Wall) is a hardworking farmer whom we see at the beginning presiding over grace at a family breakfast. There are evidently tensions with his wife Esther (Toews); and we soon learn that he is having an affair with another woman, Marianne (Pankratz) who is apparently unattached. It is a love triangle that is to cause agony and tears, but not the messy anger and voluble recrimination that we might expect from another sort of movie, or indeed from real life.

The sheer ambition of Reygadas has always been startling; now he is developing a maturity and a rigorous visual sense to match it. Here is cinema to wonder at, to argue about.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian