I finally caught up to Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies, after a while ago having at last seen Tarr’s earlier masterpiece, Satantango. Werckmeister Harmoniesabsolutely solidifies what I had strongly suspected after Satantango: That Tarr is one of contemporary cinema’s greatest filmmakers, deserving of mention alongside Kiarostami, Hou, Wong, Tsai, and von Trier.

Atmospherically, Tarr’s work is extraordinarily absorbing, hypnotic even. The starkly beautiful black and white cinematography and repeatedly employed melancholic musical theme really lend his films a uniquely, unpretentiously artful sort of gravitas absent from 99& of current movies. Like Kiarostami’s work, both Tarr films that I’ve seen seem to exist entirely outside the cinematic universe occupied by the latest Hollywood blockbusters.

Werckmeister Harmonies offers, in contrast with Satantango, a more condensed, but no less stunning, example of Tarr’s aesthetic. Both, however, straddle the line ambiguously between post-realist observations of what Jonathan Romney described as “inhospitable suburbs of Hell” and bleak, grimly comic political allegories. More than even Satantango, Werckmeister Harmonies works within a quasi-mythical dimension, meditating simultaneously on the horrors of the past (namely, ethnic cleansing and, specifically, the Holocaust) and the vaguely looming apocalypse. The present, in Tarr, is all brooding portension, just waiting to explode violently, as it does in Werckmeister’s harrowing climax.