Deliberately-paced movie that aims hard for transcendence, opening and closing with real-time sunrise/sunset scenes (beautiful, with a Last Days-paced creeping camera). Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope: “It’s a staggering shot, marked not only by duration but by the howling of unseen animals, a collective primal roar that disturbs the scene’s serenity.”

I wish the person introducing at the High hadn’t named the film’s greatest influence (Ordet) because then I spent those long, slow shots (but not static shots – one memorable spinning scene tracks Johan’s truck driving in circles) wondering when someone would die and be resurrected. That would be sad Johan’s even-sadder wife Esther, who dies of a broken heart during a rainstorm. I was surprised that it’s Johan’s affair Marianne who touches Esther and summons her back to life.

Jay Kuehner:

However Silent Light eschews the kinetics of narrative, it is by conception not without dramatic stakes. Johan’s tear-streaked face communicates a sense of pain only in the knowledge that his newfound love could harn his wife and alienate his family, consequences which Reygadas leaves unexplored. Is this a result of the director’s immanent design? If so, it’s teasingly realized in a gorgeous sequence featuring Johan and family bathing in a natural pool, the camera adhering to the children’s simple gestures as if nothing more important existed to them outside the moment – and likewise to the film outside the frame. It’s a scene of self-succifiency that produces meaning only in context with others, which bestow upon its small familial utopia a threat of impending loss. That’s enough to make a grown man cry.