A punch to the gut delivered with the grace of a ritual. Carlos Reygadas’s debut, "Japón", is a work that isn't merely seen, but one that burrows under the skin, a telluric cinematic experience that shakes the very foundations of the viewer's gaze. Shot on grainy 16mm and then blown up to 35mm, the film possesses a texture that is in itself a declaration of intent: a rough, almost abrasive material that rejects the polished, aseptic perfection of digital to embrace a painterly physicality. The images, warped at the edges by an extreme use of anamorphic lenses, do not frame the landscape, they devour it, transforming the desolate canyons of Hidalgo state into a primordial geological womb. Every frame seems like a fresco corroded by time, an archaeological relic of humanity at its most essential and brutal stage.

The premise is of a disarming, almost archetypal simplicity: a man, a painter whose name we never learn, journeys to this godforsaken place with a single purpose: suicide. He seeks silence and the end, but finds instead Ascen, an elderly indigenous widow who takes him into her dilapidated home. It is the meeting of a will to die—cerebral and nihilistic—and a life pared down to the bone, marked by hieratic gestures and a resilience as hard as the surrounding rock. The protagonist’s journey is not so much a Dantesque descent into the inferno as it is an immersion into a pre-moral dimension, a world that exists beyond good and evil, where life and death are two sides of the same indifferent, cosmic coin. If in Dostoevsky the underground man festers in his own hypertrophic consciousness, Reygadas’s protagonist is emptied out, stripped bare, forced to confront a reality that needs no intellectual justification to exist.

In "Japón", the landscape ceases to be a backdrop and becomes the absolute protagonist, a living, breathing entity that echoes the merciless and magnificent nature of a Werner Herzog. But while the jungle of Aguirre, the Wrath of God is charged with a feverish madness, here a terrifying stillness reigns, a silence pregnant with the sounds of animals, of wind, of coughing fits. It is a universe that closely recalls the desolate and amoral frontier of Cormac McCarthy, particularly that of Blood Meridian, where the sublime beauty of creation is inseparable from its intrinsic violence. Reygadas films this world with the patience of a naturalist and the vision of a metaphysician. His camera, with its slow, enveloping movements, does not judge; it observes. It records the flight of a bird with the same impassivity with which it records its death, the majesty of a galloping horse and its flayed corpse.

It is impossible not to place Reygadas, right from this stunning debut, within the great tradition of transcendental cinema. The shadow of Andrei Tarkovsky looms over every frame, in the sacredness conferred upon the natural elements, in the epiphanic use of music (here, Arvo Pärt’s heart-rending Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten) that erupts to pierce the silence, and in the search for a spirituality that comes not through dogma but through matter. However, where Tarkovsky sublimates, Reygadas anchors his quest to the flesh, to the body, to its impermanence and its humors. His approach also recalls the rigor of Robert Bresson, especially in his use of non-professional actors, whose faces and gestures become “models” bearing a truth that no performance could replicate. Ascen herself, with her face marked by time like a geographical map, possesses the iconic power of Falconetti’s Joan of Arc in Dreyer’s masterpiece.

This anchoring in the physicality of the real culminates in one of the most discussed and radical scenes in the cinema of the new millennium: the sexual encounter between the young protagonist and the elderly Ascen. Far from being an erotic or provocative act, the sequence is a desperate rite of passage, a final, brutal communion before the end. It is an act that transcends desire to become a purely existential gesture: the young, sick body seeking in the old body, nearing death, not pleasure, but a trace of the life force it has resolved to reject. Reygadas films their bodies with an almost documentary-like frankness, stripping them of all idealization. It is an intimacy with nothing comforting about it; it is awkward, difficult, almost painful, yet within it the film’s thematic core is consummated: life, in its rawest, most biological form, powerfully reasserting itself against the abstract will for annihilation.

The very title, "Japón", is a meta-textual key of rare power. Not a geographical location, but a concept: the “Land of the Rising Sun.” The protagonist seeks the definitive sunset of his own existence and finds, instead, a new, blinding, and terrible dawn. The irony, tragic and profound, is that this reaffirmation of life does not lead to a peaceful redemption. The ending, with its sudden and devastating accident, is a merciless warning: to re-embrace life is to also accept its randomness, its violence, the absence of any providential design. Salvation, if it exists at all, is not a destination but a process of continual, painful immersion in the chaos of the world.

With "Japón", Carlos Reygadas did not simply direct a film; he sculpted an experience. He has taken the language of European art-house cinema and grafted it onto the arid, magical heart of rural Mexico, creating a hybrid of disconcerting power. It is a work that repels the lazy viewer, forcing them to renegotiate their relationship with the image, with time, and with the body. It is a cinema that hurts, that gets you dirty, but that for this very reason manages to strike chords of an almost unbearable authenticity. A debut feature that has the density and ferocity of a testament, the ground zero from which one of the most important voices in contemporary cinema began to trace his inimitable path.