The Turin Horse

The Turin Horse takes its starting point from an incident in Turin in January 1889, when the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche threw his arms around an exhausted carriage horse that was being whipped by its driver, then collapsed and withdrew into silence and mental illness for the rest of his life. The film turns away from the philosopher to ask what became of the horse and the man who owned it, following a farmer and his daughter through six days in a windswept, barren countryside, where they eat boiled potatoes, haul loads into town and tend an ageing animal that can no longer earn them a living. Their routine erodes as the wind rises and their world grows emptier.

Béla Tarr directed and wrote the screenplay with László Krasznahorkai, his regular collaborator on Damnation, Satantango, Werckmeister Harmonies and The Man from London. It is the seventh feature in the list of his directed works, arriving after The Man from London in 2008. János Derzsi plays the farmer Ohlsdorfer, Erika Bók plays his daughter and Mihály Kormos appears as Bernhard, with Mihály Ráday providing narration. The film runs 155 minutes and was made for about 1 million USD with producers Ruth Waldburger, Gábor Téni and Martin Hagemann, drawing on German, Hungarian, French and Swiss backing. It holds a critics' rating of 8.1/10 from 63 reviews and a TMDB rating of 7.6/10 from 432 votes, indicating solid approval from both critics and viewers.