Perdition is the moment when Tarr, aligning his vision with that of writer László Krasznahorkai (who co-wrote the screenplay, adapting his own novel), stops observing social despair and begins to film ontological decay. The rain that falls incessantly in this film is not water; it is time itself liquefying, eroding every illusion of meaning, every narrative pretense, leaving only mud, alcohol, and the circular choreography of waiting. We are at the end of history, in the muddy twilight of the Kádár regime in Hungary, but the crisis here is not ideological. It is geological. The soul itself is crumbling.

The aesthetics of Perdition are its philosophy. Tarr and his director of photography, Gábor Medvigy, do not use black and white: they sculpt in gray, in a scale of ash ranging from cigarette smoke to caked mud. The film opens (and continues) with what would become the director's trademark: slow, inexorable sequence shots that do not follow the action but precede or abandon it. The famous opening tracking shot on the cable cars carrying coal is not an industrial backdrop; it is a metaphor for the universe. They are empty buckets descending into nothingness to bring back more nothingness, in a perpetual and useless cycle. Tarr's camera is not the eye of God; it is the eye of a weary ghost, a witness who cannot intervene, floating through walls and wet windows with spectral grace. If editing, from Eisenstein onwards, creates meaning through collision (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), “Tarr-time” creates meaning through duration. It forces us to stay, to endure, to share the same stagnant temporality as its characters, until our bourgeois impatience collapses and we surrender to the rhythm of emptiness.

The film has the skeletal structure of a film noir, but it is a noir that has been left to decompose in the rain for a decade. There is a desperate antihero, Karrer (Miklós Székely B.), a man whose depression is so all-encompassing that it has become his only driving force. There is a worn-out femme fatale, Singer (Vali Kerekes) from the Titanik bar (a name that is not a coincidence, but a diagnosis). There is intrigue (smuggling) and betrayal. But Tarr empties these tropes of all their romantic or psychological connotations. Karrer's obsession with the singer is not passion; it is a desperate search for an object onto which to project his immobility, another empty being with whom to attempt friction. Their sex is mechanical, desperate, a gymnastics of loneliness. The “plot” is just another failed ritual, a convulsive movement before existential rigor mortis. The Titanik bar is not a meeting place, but the wreckage of community, where the only liturgy left is alcohol and the music of Mihály Víg, a funeral dirge that sounds like a tango for ghosts.

The real protagonist of the film is the atmosphere. The mud. The omnipresent rain. And the dogs. The dogs of Perdition are the true inhabitants of this world, the guardians of the abyss. They are Tarr's version of the Greek Furies, or perhaps, more simply, the life form that has already accepted Kárhozat (Damnation). The way Karrer is surrounded by a pack of barking dogs at one point is not a physical threat; it is a recognition. They, who live in the mud, recognize him as an impostor, one who still clings pathetically to the remnants of humanity. The landscape is not a backdrop; it is a landscape-soul. This is not socialist realism; it is inverted expressionism. It is not the inner world that distorts the outer reality, but the outer reality—industrial collapse, ideological failure, dampness—that has invaded and replaced the inner world.

Karrer's catabasis is total. After being betrayed (not by an evil plan, but by the simple, banal desperation of others), Karrer takes the final step. The film is a parable about the loss of humanity as the only form of adaptation. In the final, shocking sequence, Karrer joins the dogs. It is not a metaphor. In the pouring rain, ankle-deep in mud, he crouches down and begins to bark. He has not gone mad. He has simply stopped lying. He has stopped pretending to be ‘human’, a concept that no longer has any value in this universe. He has accepted his true nature, that of a creature of the mud, a post-historical being whose only possible expression is to bark at the cosmic void. In Perdizione, there is no God and there is no Devil. There is only the weather. And the weather is terminal. It is a work of desolate and relentless beauty, a testament that teaches us that hell is not fire; hell is humidity.