Legend has it, or perhaps it is historical truth transfigured into parable, that on January 3rd, 1889, in Turin's Piazza Carlo Alberto, Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a coachman brutally flogging his horse. The philosopher, in a fit of cosmic compassion that marked his final mental collapse, ran to embrace the animal's neck to protect it, bursting into tears. Then, silence. Ten years of catatonic darkness until his death. The question that Béla Tarr, the Hungarian high priest of eschatological cinema, asks himself is not “what happened to Nietzsche?” That is history, pathology, anecdote. The question that reverberates like a dull thunder through all 146 minutes of "The Turin Horse" is another, infinitely heavier and more terrible: “what happened to the horse?”

Tarr’s answer is a cinematic poem about the end of all things, an anti-Genesis in six days, shot in a black and white so textural and grainy it seems sculpted from mud and ash. There is no Turin, no Nietzsche, no crowd. There is only the coachman, Ohlsdorfer (János Derzsi), his daughter (Erika Bók), and the horse, trapped in an isolated farmhouse, lashed by an incessant wind that seems to want to uproot every trace of life from the world. The film opens with a narrated prologue that hands us the historical event, only to abandon us, without appeal, to its metaphysical consequence. We witness the daily routine of the two protagonists: waking, dressing with mechanical, weary gestures, drawing water from the well, boiling two potatoes—their only meal, eaten with their hands, scalding hot, in a tomb-like silence—and attempting to make the horse work. But on the second day, the horse refuses. It will not eat. It will not move. It is the crack in the fabric of reality, the first symptom of a universal collapse.

If Samuel Beckett had written Genesis in reverse, the result would be frighteningly similar to this. The film’s structure is an ontological countdown. Day by day, a piece of the world is taken away. The horse, the driving force, the Schopenhauerian will to live incarnate, gives way. The well, that primordial source of life, runs dry. A visitor, a neighbor who arrives to buy some pálinka, spews an apocalyptic monologue on the degradation of the noble and the divine, a torrent of words that is the last, desperate attempt to give narrative sense to the unraveling, before being swallowed again by the storm. Finally, light itself, the embers in the hearth and the flame of the oil lamp, is extinguished, refusing to obey the laws of physics. This is not the spectacular apocalypse of Hollywood, with its explosions and its heroes. This is an apocalypse by subtraction, a slow, inexorable fading. It is entropy made visible.

Béla Tarr, who has declared this to be his final film, orchestrates his requiem with a stylistic coherence that is breathtaking. The entire work is composed of just thirty long takes. Fred Kelemen's camera does not merely observe; it stalks, encircles, and clings to the characters like a shroud, transforming every gesture—peeling a potato, putting on a coat—into a titanic ritual against the void. The long, exhausting duration of the shots is not an auteurist affectation, but a precise philosophical choice: to force the viewer to feel the weight of time, to experience the duration of existence in its rawest, most repetitive form. It is the same logic that animates Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, where the disintegration of a woman’s domestic routine coincides with her psychological disintegration. Here, however, the disintegration is not individual, but cosmic.

The soundscape is dominated by two elements: the perpetual lament of the wind, almost a character in its own right, the very voice of the encroaching void; and Mihály Víg's minimal and obsessive score, a cello ostinato that repeats like a funeral mantra, marking the cycles of an existence that is spinning its wheels. The silence between father and daughter is not one of incommunicability, but of the exhaustion of words. What is left to say when the world itself is falling silent forever? In this post-Nietzschean universe, God is not simply dead; He never existed, and even His absence is now fading away.

Perhaps the most fitting analogy is not with cinema, but with twentieth-century literature. There is the desolate landscape and physical desperation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but without its final glimmer of hope. There is the Kafkaesque absurdity of a sentence without a crime and without a judge. But above all, as mentioned, there is Beckett. Ohlsdorfer and his daughter are Vladimir and Estragon after it has become clear that Godot will never arrive. They are Hamm and Clov from Endgame, shut in their shelter while everything outside comes to an end. Their routine is no longer a way to pass the time, but the last bulwark against dissolution. When the horse stops, when the well runs dry, when they try to leave with their cart only to return, defeated, right back where they started, they understand they are prisoners not of a place, but of existence itself. The only freedom is the end.

This is a telluric, anti-psychological cinema. We know nothing of these characters’ pasts, we have no access to their thoughts. They are bodies, defined by their fatigue, their hunger, their crumbling resilience. János Derzsi, with his paralyzed arm and his face carved like a cliffside, is a tragic mask of archaic power. Erika Bók, with her eyes wide open to the void, embodies a resignation that is not weakness, but the final acknowledgment of the inevitable. The scene in which the father forces his daughter to eat the raw potato in total darkness is one of the most chilling and powerful moments in the history of cinema. It is no longer nourishment; it is an act of pure, desperate will against annihilation: "We must eat." Why? There is no answer. It is life's categorical imperative reduced to its absolute zero, an instant before it evaporates.

"The Turin Horse" is not a film to be "enjoyed"; it is an experience to be endured. It is a terminal work, a point of no return. Tarr takes Nietzsche’s compassion for that single suffering creature and expands it to a universal scale, showing not only the suffering of the horse, but the suffering intrinsic to being, the unbearable weight of matter. It is a film that stands beyond good and evil, beyond hope and despair. It is a cinematic black hole that sucks in all light, all meaning, all narrative, leaving only the image of two human beings sitting at a table, in the dark, in silence, as the world, finally, surrenders. An absolute and definitive masterpiece. The final crack of the whip, before the eternal silence.