Carlos Reygadas has never shown much interest in making films that are easy to explain, although his work has usually found a way to connect its more mysterious elements to recognizably human experiences. Since Japón in 2002, the Mexican filmmaker has built an impressive career on the international festival circuit, with some of his greatest achievements coming at Cannes. Silent Light won the Jury Prize in 2007, while the extraordinary Post Tenebras Lux earned him the Best Director award five years later. Both films demonstrated his ability to approach familiar emotions from unusual perspectives, often allowing images to express things that dialogue could hardly communicate. Eight years after Our Time, Reygadas returns with Heil Jupiter!, which premiered at the New York Film Festival. It’s a particularly wild addition to his filmography, taking his fascination with human nature and the physical world into territory that even those familiar with his cinema might find surprising.
The opening already demands a certain amount of patience. Abstract patterns of colour gradually give way to a rocky coastline, where enormous waves crash against the shore and the camera seems almost hypnotized by their movement. Eventually, four young people appear among the rocks, apparently enjoying a carefree afternoon together. Their conversations and romantic encounters develop into increasingly explicit displays of intimacy, observed from angles that make the human body appear as unfamiliar as the surrounding landscape. There is something almost innocent about their behaviour, despite the graphic nature of the images, as though they belonged to a world where desire had never become a source of shame. Reygadas takes this idea quite literally when the camera ventures inside one of their bodies, beginning a journey that soon leaves conventional storytelling behind. From this point onwards, the film moves across different countries and seemingly incompatible realities, introducing characters and situations that share little obvious connection with what came before.
Among the most memorable episodes is a police operation in a Polish village, filmed largely from the perspective of body cameras. Officers enter a house and arrest a woman accused of witchcraft, eventually subjecting her to a medieval test involving immersion in water. The procedure is carried out with modern equipment and supported by technological systems that seem to have replaced any reasonable form of human judgment. The absurdity of the situation is genuinely disturbing, especially because everyone involved behaves as though the process were perfectly normal. Later, another woman (both from the prologue) faces a similarly ridiculous accusation during an extended courtroom sequence, where the elaborate machinery of justice becomes an instrument of humiliation. These scenes establish one of the film’s more accessible concerns, the ease with which societies can turn their prejudices into laws and then use those laws to justify almost any kind of cruelty.
Reygadas approaches these ideas through an astonishing variety of images, often changing his visual language without warning. His attachment to the imperfections of older, analogue photography has always been an important part of his cinema. Where modern digital images tend towards flawless clarity, he seems more interested in the mysterious, almost dreamlike qualities that can emerge from optical irregularities. The distorted lenses familiar from Post Tenebras Lux return here, blurring and doubling the edges of the frame while preserving a more recognizable image at its centre. These distortions give the landscapes a fascinating sense of depth, as though reality were being observed through an imperfect piece of glass. Elsewhere, the carefully arranged compositions give way to the nervous movements of surveillance footage, or to digital effects that transform recognizable objects into shapes that seem to belong to another dimension. The photography has a physical quality that is becoming increasingly rare, particularly in the attention paid to textures and the unpredictable movement of water. Even a close-up of a pig giving birth becomes a remarkably absorbing spectacle.
There is a deliberate contrast between the freedom of the opening scenes and the increasingly oppressive environments that follow. The bodies that initially existed without embarrassment are eventually inspected and judged by people who claim to represent a higher moral order. Technology plays a particularly sinister part in this process, offering new ways to monitor individuals while preserving some of humanity’s oldest superstitions. Reygadas seems to imagine a dystopian future where human beings are reduced to little more than meat for slaughter, while artificial intelligence watches over them like an enormous, almost divine presence against which resistance seems impossible. In this context, the title Heil Jupiter! takes on a particularly sinister meaning, suggesting a world where technology has become a new god demanding absolute obedience.
The reference to fascist obedience in the title becomes increasingly appropriate as the film progresses, especially through the suggestion of an invisible authority watching over everything. Reygadas gives these political ideas a strange form, without losing his interest in the pleasures and vulnerabilities of physical existence. The main difficulty lies in the way he allows the film to wander between its ideas. Earlier works had a stronger dramatic foundation, even when their imagery became difficult to interpret. Post Tenebras Lux, for instance, could be described as the story of a family whose apparently peaceful existence is gradually corrupted by something darker lurking beneath the surface. Reygadas surrounds this relatively simple premise with dreams, disturbing visions and shifts in time, yet the family’s progressive disintegration gives these elements a common direction. Heil Jupiter! pushes much further in the opposite direction, making abstraction the very basis of its construction rather than something that enriches an identifiable narrative. Individual sequences can be fascinating, yet their relationship to one another is sometimes too fragile to sustain the same level of interest.
Still, the film contains enough extraordinary moments to justify much of its excess. Reygadas remains a filmmaker with an exceptional eye and sensibility for images, and his ability to move from the beautiful to the grotesque can make even the most bewildering passages unexpectedly compelling. There’s also something refreshing about the sheer unpredictability of Heil Jupiter!, which seems determined to pursue every strange possibility that occurs to its director. Some experiments are more successful than others, and the film occasionally sacrifices emotional involvement in favour of its own visual curiosity. It may eventually be remembered as one of Reygadas’ least disciplined films rather than one of his finest, although its ambition and occasional brilliance are difficult to dismiss. Few directors working today would approach such material with this degree of freedom, and watching Reygadas follow his imagination wherever it takes him remains a fascinating experience.
