An Exploration of Presence, Duration, and the Sacred in Contemporary Filmmaking
In the landscape of contemporary slow cinema, few filmmakers have pursued such an uncompromising vision of spiritual transcendence through cinematic duration as Carlos Reygadas. Born in Mexico City in 1971, this former international lawyer abandoned his legal career to embark on what would become one of the most singular filmmaking trajectories in Latin American cinema. Emerging at the turn of the millennium alongside—yet decidedly apart from—the commercial successes of Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, Reygadas has carved a distinct path that privileges existential inquiry over narrative convention, sensory immersion over psychological exposition.
The Arrival: Japón and the Aesthetics of Dead Time
Reygadas’ first feature, Japón, premiered in 2002 at the Rotterdam Film Festival and received a special mention for the Caméra d’Or prize at Cannes, immediately establishing him as a provocateur within the festival circuit. The film announced not merely a new voice but an entirely different cinematic language—one rooted in what we might call an aesthetics of presence rather than representation. In Japón, an unnamed middle-aged painter travels from Mexico City to a remote canyon in Hidalgo with the stated intention of ending his life. Yet the film refuses the psychology typically attendant to such a premise. We are given no backstory, no motivation, no interiority beyond what can be gleaned from the character’s physical presence within the frame.
What Reygadas offers instead is something far more radical: a cinema predicated on what film scholar Eugenio Di Stefano has termed “dead time”—those moments when narrative progression ceases and duration itself becomes the subject of contemplation. The film’s famous seven-minute closing shot exemplifies this approach: a slow circular tracking movement around a train track, set to Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” transforms landscape into something approaching the sublime. As Reygadas himself has noted, this sequence was meticulously calculated, mathematically timed to the music, yet its effect is one of apparent spontaneity, of reality captured in its raw state.
The film’s title gestures toward this tension between calculation and immediacy. Though named after Japan, the country is never mentioned or depicted—the title functions as pure signifier, severed from its referent, pointing toward a kind of spiritual geography rather than a physical one. This is characteristic of Reygadas’ approach: his films operate in a realm where the literal and the metaphorical continuously interpenetrate, where the physical world becomes charged with numinous significance.
Recruiting nonprofessional actors—most notably 79-year-old Magdalena Flores as the elderly woman Ascen who takes in the protagonist—Reygadas filmed in sublime 16mm CinemaScope, exploring the harsh beauty of the Mexican countryside with earthy tactility. The choice of nonprofessionals became a signature of his methodology, one that aligns him with Robert Bresson’s concept of “models” rather than actors. Yet where Bresson sought a kind of affective flatness, Reygadas allows his performers a more naturalistic comportment, creating a strange hybrid between documentary observation and staged composition.
The film’s treatment of sexuality and death scandalized some viewers while mesmerizing others. An explicit sex scene between the young painter and the elderly Ascen deliberately confronts conventional notions of desire and beauty. Reygadas defended such choices not as provocations but as simple realism—these bodies, these acts, exist in the world we inhabit. The film also includes scenes of animal death, including an unsimulated bird killing, which led to cuts in certain markets and fierce debate about the ethics of documentary capture versus artistic necessity.
Batalla en el Cielo: The Body Politic
Reygadas’ second feature, Battle in Heaven, competed for the Palme d’Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival and gained worldwide notoriety for its graphic depiction of sexual encounters between its characters. If Japón explored existential despair through landscape and solitude, Battle in Heaven confronts guilt and class through corporeality and urban space. The film follows Marcos, a working-class chauffeur who, along with his wife, has accidentally killed a child they kidnapped for ransom. His attempt to confess this crime to Ana, his employer’s daughter and a sex worker, leads to her murder and his subsequent pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The film opens and closes with explicit images of Ana performing fellatio on the obese Marcos—scenes that generated considerable controversy and accusations of exploitation. Yet these images function less as titillation than as a kind of political economy of the body. The juxtaposition of Marcos’ indigenous, overweight body with Ana’s young, conventionally attractive, white Mexican body literalizes the class and racial hierarchies that structure Mexican society. Their sexual encounter becomes a metaphor for the unequal exchange of capital, desire, and power that characterizes contemporary Mexico.
The film’s narrative is elliptical, refusing conventional exposition or psychological depth. We are shown actions—a kiss, a murder, a religious procession—but denied access to the interior lives that might explain these actions. This approach aligns Reygadas with the tradition of Bresson and Dreyer, filmmakers who sought spiritual truth not through performance but through the arrangement of bodies in space, the durational quality of the image, the rhythms created by editing.
The film has been named one of the decade’s best by the British Film Institute, which called Reygadas “the one-man third wave of Mexican cinema.” This designation points to his unique position within Mexican cinema—neither aligned with the socially-conscious tradition of the Golden Age nor with the genre-savvy internationalism of his contemporaries, but rather forging an entirely personal cinema rooted in religious and philosophical inquiry.
Silent Light: Dialogues with Dreyer
Reygadas’ third feature, Silent Light, premiered at Cannes in 2007 and won the Jury Prize. The film marked both a culmination of his aesthetic project and a surprising departure. Set in a Mennonite community in Chihuahua, with all dialogue in Plautdietsch (Low German), the film tells a relatively straightforward story of adultery: Johan, a married farmer with many children, falls in love with another woman, Marianne, threatening the stability of his family and their standing within their conservative religious community.
The film opens with an unbroken shot of a sunrise lasting several minutes and closes with a similar shot of sunset—each sequence a masterpiece of time-lapse cinematography that bookends the human drama with cosmic indifference. These framing devices establish the film’s essential tension: human desires and moral struggles play out against the vast, indifferent rhythms of natural time. The film’s original Plautdietsch title, “Stellet Licht,” translates to “Silent Light,” referring to the quality of northern light, but also suggesting a kind of spiritual illumination that occurs without fanfare or announcement.
The film’s most obvious reference point is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, particularly in its climactic resurrection scene. Reygadas has acknowledged this debt openly, calling Silent Light “Ordet’s little brother.” When Johan’s wife Esther dies of heartbreak during a rain-drenched car ride—one of the film’s most devastating sequences—the narrative seems to reach an impasse. The subsequent wake scene, shot in Dreyer’s austere style with the body laid out in a white room, builds toward a moment of impossible grace: Marianne kisses Esther, and the dead woman returns to life.
This moment has generated extensive critical debate. Some view it as a wholesale theft from Dreyer; others see it as a sophisticated recontextualization that transforms Dreyer’s exploration of faith into something more pantheistic, more rooted in human connection than divine intervention. The key difference lies in agency: in Ordet, it is faith—specifically the faith of Johannes, the character who believes himself to be Christ—that enacts the resurrection. In Silent Light, it is love itself, embodied in Marianne’s kiss, that proves redemptive. Reygadas’ universe, while profoundly spiritual, locates the sacred within human relation rather than in transcendent belief.
Time magazine wrote that all the scenes shine with visual and emotional brilliance, while Roger Ebert ranked it among the best films of the 2000s. The film represents Reygadas at his most formally rigorous and emotionally direct. The long takes—a car disappearing over a hillside, a garage standing against the sky, a father and son searching for words of consolation—achieve a kind of phenomenological purity. We are not watching representations of these actions but experiencing them in something approaching real time, allowing duration itself to become a form of content.
The performances by the nonprofessional Mennonite actors achieve an extraordinary quality of lived truth. These are not people acting roles but essentially living their lives before the camera, compressed and shaped by Reygadas’ framing but retaining an essential authenticity. Miriam Toews, a Canadian author who grew up Mennonite, brings particular depth to the role of Esther, her performance in the rain scene achieving a raw emotional power that transcends conventional acting.
Post Tenebras Lux: After Darkness, Confusion
Post Tenebras Lux, which translates to “Light After Darkness,” premiered at Cannes in 2012, where it won Reygadas the Best Director award but was met with divided reactions, including boos at the screening. The film marks Reygadas’ most experimental and divisive work, a semi-autobiographical meditation that abandons linear narrative entirely in favor of a kaleidoscopic structure mixing memory, fantasy, and observation.
The film opens with one of contemporary cinema’s most haunting sequences: Reygadas’ young daughter Rut runs through a muddy field at dusk, surrounded by dogs and cattle, as storm clouds gather. The image is shot with a distorting lens that blurs and doubles the edges of the frame, creating a dreamlike, almost hallucinatory quality. This visual effect—inspired by looking through old, imperfect glass—becomes the film’s dominant formal gesture, suggesting that all perception is mediated, warped by desire and memory.
The narrative, such as it is, centers on Juan, a wealthy man living with his wife Natalia and their children in a modern house situated incongruously in rural Mexico. Reygadas himself plays Juan, with his actual wife playing Natalia, in their real home—a choice that blurs the boundary between fiction and autobiography to an almost uncomfortable degree. The film includes a glowing red CGI devil wandering through the house with a toolbox, English schoolboys playing rugby (Reygadas attended school in England), and a French bathhouse orgy sequence. These elements resist easy interpretation, existing as fragments of consciousness, memory, or fantasy rather than as coherent narrative episodes.
Critics were sharply divided. Some found the film pretentious and self-indulgent, a prime example of art cinema’s worst excesses. Others saw it as a bold attempt to create a new cinematic language capable of expressing the fragmentary, non-linear nature of consciousness itself. The film’s title, a Protestant Reformation motto, suggests illumination following darkness, but whether the film itself achieves such illumination remains contentious.
What is undeniable is the film’s visual beauty, captured by cinematographer Alexis Zabé. The Mexican countryside appears in all its contradictory glory—edenic yet threatening, beautiful yet harsh. A sequence of Juan and his children playing in the grass achieves an almost unbearable tenderness, the camera lingering on small gestures and expressions with devotional attention. These moments of domestic intimacy contrast sharply with scenes of violence: Juan beating a dog, his conflict with local workers, the film’s enigmatic conclusion.
The film’s fractured structure can be understood as an attempt to visualize what Reygadas has called his interest in making films where “reason will intervene as little as possible.” This is not anti-intellectualism but rather a privileging of feeling and sensation over logical progression. The film asks to be experienced rather than understood, to wash over the viewer like music rather than to be parsed like text. It is Reygadas at his most uncompromising, refusing any concession to narrative clarity or conventional satisfaction.
Nuestro Tiempo: The Personal Made Public
Reygadas’ 2018 film Our Time premiered at the Venice Film Festival, nominated for the Golden Lion. Again starring Reygadas and his wife in lead roles, the film explores the disintegration of an open marriage as Juan (Reygadas) becomes consumed by jealousy when his wife Esther (Natalia López) develops feelings for an American horse trainer. Set on a bull ranch that Reygadas actually owns, the film is his most overtly narrative since Silent Light, yet it maintains his commitment to duration, observation, and the primacy of the image over dialogue.
The film’s runtime of nearly three hours allows Reygadas to develop his themes with deliberate patience. Long sequences of ranch life—horses being trained, bulls fighting, children playing—establish a rhythm of daily existence that the emotional drama slowly disrupts. The film explores masculine insecurity and the impossibility of escaping jealousy even within a theoretically liberated relationship structure. Juan’s intellectual commitment to openness proves no match for his emotional response to actual infidelity.
What distinguishes the film is Reygadas’ willingness to expose his own vulnerabilities. By playing a version of himself experiencing humiliation and rage, he creates a work of almost uncomfortably raw self-examination. The film asks difficult questions about the relationship between theory and practice, between our ideals and our actual emotional capacities. It suggests that enlightenment, whether spiritual or sexual, cannot be achieved through intellectual conviction alone but must be lived, suffered through, embodied.
The Reygadas Method: Toward a Cinema of Presence
Across his five features, certain consistent preoccupations and methodologies emerge. Reygadas works almost exclusively with nonprofessional actors, believing that trained performers bring too much technique, too much self-consciousness to the frame. He seeks instead what he calls “presence”—the quality of simply being before the camera rather than performing. This approach aligns him with the long tradition of slow cinema practitioners from Ozu to Kiarostami, filmmakers who prize authenticity of being over virtuosity of performance.
His films are characterized by extremely long takes, allowing actions to unfold in something approaching real time. This durational approach transforms the viewing experience from consumption to endurance, demanding a different kind of attention from the audience. We cannot simply watch a Reygadas film; we must inhabit it, submit to its temporal rhythms, allow ourselves to be absorbed into its particular reality.
The use of landscape is crucial throughout his work. Whether the canyons of Hidalgo, the Mennonite farms of Chihuahua, or his own ranch in Morelos, geography becomes a kind of character, an active participant in the drama rather than mere backdrop. Nature appears in all its indifference and beauty, its cycles continuing regardless of human joy or suffering. This creates a persistent tension in the films between the cosmic and the intimate, between the eternal and the momentary.
Reygadas has cited as influences The Young and the Damned, Sansho the Bailiff, A Man Escaped, Persona, Andrei Rublev, and other works by masters of slow cinema. These are films that privilege contemplation over action, that find profundity in stillness, that treat cinema as a medium capable of spiritual inquiry. Like Tarkovsky, Bresson, and Dreyer before him, Reygadas believes cinema can access truths unavailable to more discursive forms.
His films engage explicitly with religious themes—Catholic guilt, Protestant redemption, spiritual transcendence—but from a perspective that is ultimately humanistic. The sacred, in Reygadas’ cinema, emerges from human connection, from the act of seeing and being seen, from the grace of present attention. His characters seek meaning not in doctrinal certainty but in moments of authentic encounter with others and with the natural world.
The explicit sexuality in his films serves a similar function. These are not erotic scenes designed to titillate but attempts to show human bodies in their full complexity and vulnerability. Sex becomes another site of authentic encounter, stripped of conventional aestheticization, presented with the same unflinching attention he brings to landscape or prayer. This has made him controversial, accused alternately of exploitation or courageousness depending on the viewer’s perspective.
The Politics of Slowness
To understand Reygadas requires understanding the political dimensions of slow cinema itself. In an era of accelerated media consumption, of algorithmic recommendation and attention economies, the decision to make films that demand hours of patient attention is inherently radical. Reygadas’ cinema refuses the logic of capital, which requires efficiency, productivity, measurable outcomes. His films produce nothing but experience—they cannot be summarized, their meanings cannot be extracted and packaged for easy consumption.
This refusal has commercial consequences. Reygadas works outside the Hollywood system, funded by international co-productions and festival support. His films reach limited audiences, primarily those already committed to art cinema and willing to undertake the demanding viewing experience his work requires. Yet this marginality is precisely what allows his uncompromised vision—he answers to no studio, no market demand, only to his own rigorous artistic principles.
Within the context of Mexican cinema, Reygadas occupies a unique position. He emerged during a moment of unprecedented international success for Mexican filmmakers, yet his work bears little resemblance to the more accessible dramas and genre exercises that have won global audiences. He represents an alternative path, one that prioritizes artistic integrity over commercial viability, that locates Mexican cinema within a global tradition of slow cinema rather than within national or regional categories.
His insistence on filming in Mexico, using Mexican landscapes and often Mexican nonprofessional actors, grounds his work in specific geography even as his themes gesture toward universality. The Mennonites of Silent Light are Mexican, yet they speak German and practice a form of Christianity imported from Europe. This hybridity characterizes contemporary Mexico itself—a palimpsest of indigenous, colonial, and modern influences that cannot be reduced to simplistic national identity.
Legacy and Influence
Reygadas has also worked as a producer, supporting the work of directors like Amat Escalante and Dea Kulumbegashvili, helping to nurture a new generation of contemplative filmmakers. His influence extends beyond his own films to shape an emerging aesthetic that privileges durational experience and phenomenological presence. Filmmakers working in this tradition—from Apichatpong Weerasethakul to Lucretia Martel to Lisandro Alonso—share Reygadas’ commitment to cinema as a medium of spiritual and philosophical inquiry.
In 2023, Reygadas published Presencia, a book on cinema and the source of creation, codifying his theoretical understanding of film as an art of presence rather than representation. This text provides crucial insight into his methodology, articulating the philosophical foundations of his practice. For Reygadas, cinema’s unique power lies in its capacity to record the present moment, to capture duration itself, to preserve not just images but time.
The question of Reygadas’ place within film history remains open. His films have won major prizes and passionate advocates, yet they remain divisive, frustrating as many viewers as they entrance. This divisiveness itself may be their strength—they refuse easy categorization, resist critical consensus, demand that each viewer make their own accommodation with their difficulty.
What seems certain is that Reygadas represents an essential strain within contemporary cinema—one that insists on film’s capacity for transcendence, for accessing truths that cannot be spoken but only shown, only experienced. In an era of increasing homogenization, when streaming algorithms and franchise logic threaten to reduce cinema to content, Reygadas’ uncompromising vision offers a necessary counterpoint. His films ask nothing less than that we slow down, pay attention, open ourselves to experiences that cannot be consumed but must be lived through.
Conclusion: The Paradox of Presence
The central paradox of Reygadas’ cinema is that it achieves its effects through the most artificial of means—cinema itself, with all its apparatus of cameras, lenses, editing, and projection—yet strives toward something like unmediated reality. His films are meticulously constructed, every shot calculated, every duration considered, yet they aspire to the condition of documentary, to capturing life as it is lived rather than as it is performed.
This paradox cannot be resolved, only inhabited. Reygadas’ films exist in the tension between artifice and authenticity, between calculation and spontaneity, between the constructed and the captured. They ask us to believe in their reality even as we remain aware of their fabrication. This is, perhaps, the condition of all art—but Reygadas makes this tension explicit, foregrounding the medium even as he attempts to transcend it.
Whether his cinema constitutes a major achievement or an interesting dead end will be determined by time and by the filmmakers who follow. What cannot be disputed is its singularity—there are Reygadas imitators but no one quite like him, no one who combines his particular mixture of philosophical seriousness, visual beauty, and uncompromising difficulty. In a landscape of increasingly safe and similar cinema, his work stands as a testament to the possibility of a genuinely personal cinema, one that answers to no authority but the director’s own rigorous vision.
His films remind us that cinema can be more than entertainment, more than narrative, more than spectacle. It can be a form of meditation, a way of seeing, a means of attending to the world with concentrated awareness. In this, Reygadas belongs to a lineage of contemplative filmmakers who have used the camera not to escape reality but to penetrate more deeply into it, to reveal the sacred dimension hidden within the everyday. Whether we find this vision compelling or insufferable says as much about us as it does about his films—and perhaps that is the point. Reygadas’ cinema demands that we declare ourselves, that we take a position in relation to fundamental questions about art, reality, and the possibility of transcendence. There is no neutral ground, no easy accommodation. We must either submit to the experience or reject it—and in that demand lies both the challenge and the value of his uncompromising art.