A punch in the stomach delivered with the grace of a ritual. Carlos Reygadas' debut film, Japón, is a work that gets under your skin, a seismic cinematic experience that shakes the very foundations of the viewer's gaze. Shot in grainy 16mm and then blown up to 35mm, the film has a texture that is already a statement of intent: a rough, almost abrasive material that rejects the smooth, aseptic perfection of digital to embrace a pictorial physicality. The images, distorted at the edges by extreme use of anamorphic lenses, do not frame the landscape, they devour it, transforming the desolate canyons of the state of Hidalgo into a primordial geological womb. Each frame looks like a fresco corroded by time, an archaeological find of humanity at its most essential and brutal stage.

The premise is disarmingly simple, almost archetypal: a man, a painter whose name we will never know, travels to this godforsaken place with a single purpose, suicide. He seeks silence and the end, but instead finds Ascen, an elderly Indian widow who welcomes him into her dilapidated home. It is the encounter between a cerebral and nihilistic desire for death and a life reduced to the bare bones, marked by solemn gestures and a resilience as hard as the surrounding rock. The protagonist's journey is not so much a descent into Dante's underworld as 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 is tormented by his own hypertrophic conscience, Reygadas' protagonist is emptied, 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, pulsating entity that echoes the ruthless and grandiose nature of Werner Herzog. But if in the jungle of Aguirre, the Wrath of God there is a feverish madness, here there reigns a terrifying quiet, a silence pregnant with animal sounds, wind, and coughs. It is a universe closely reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's desolate and amoral frontier, 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 skinned body.

It is impossible not to include Reygadas, from this dazzling debut, in the great tradition of transcendental cinema. The shadow of Andrei Tarkovsky looms over every frame, in the sacredness conferred on the natural elements, in the epiphanic use of music (here Arvo Pärt's heart-rending Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten) that bursts in to pierce the silence, and in the search for a spirituality that does not pass through dogma but through matter. However, where Tarkovsky sublimates, Reygadas still anchors his search to the flesh, to the body, to its transience and its moods. His approach is also reminiscent of Robert Bresson's rigor, especially in his use of non-professional actors, whose faces and gestures become “models” conveying a truth that no acting 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 to the physicality of reality 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 close to death, not pleasure, but a trace of that vital force it has decided to reject. Reygadas films the bodies with an almost documentary-like frankness, stripping them of all idealization. It is an intimacy that is not at all comforting; it is awkward, difficult, almost painful, but it consummates the film's central theme: life, in its rawest and most biological form, reasserting itself powerfully against the abstract will to annihilation.

The title itself, Japón, is a meta-textual interpretation of rare power. It is not a geographical indication, but a concept: the “Land of the Rising Sun.” The protagonist seeks the definitive sunset of his existence and finds, instead, a new, blinding, and terrible dawn. The tragic and profound irony is that this reaffirmation of life does not lead to peaceful redemption. The ending, with its sudden and devastating accident, is a ruthless warning: embracing life again means accepting its randomness, violence, and the absence of a providential plan. Salvation, if it exists at all, is a process of continuous, painful immersion in the chaos of the world.

With Japón, Carlos Reygadas has sculpted an experience. He has taken the language of European auteur cinema and grafted it onto the arid and 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 cinema that hurts, that dirties, but precisely for this reason manages to strike chords of almost unbearable authenticity. A debut work that has the density and ferocity of a testament, the starting point from which one of the most important voices in contemporary cinema began to trace its inimitable path.