Review #208: Werckmeister Harmonies (2001)

This review was originally written in 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #63: Werckmeister Harmonies (2001)

I'm just gonna get right out and say it: this movie sucks, and whoever made it clearly has no respect whatsoever for the time of any of its viewers. I've glanced at some of the reviews on IMDB and the vast majority seem to give it endless praise for some sort of visionary imagery and powerful music and yadda yadda yadda, but to me- pardon my language- that just sounds like pretentious, self-gratifying bullshit.

Werckmeister Harmonies is a black-and-white Hungarian film about a small town where a riot is (very, very) slowly brewing. The movie seems to imply that this has something to do with a circus coming to town, but given how briefly this circus actually shows up in the film and how nobody seems to actually react to it, I fail to see the connection. (Also: nowhere except my Bucket List can I find anyone claiming this is horror!)

As I said, this movie sucks. This is quite possibly the most boring, plodding movie I've ever seen, and I wasn't exaggerating when I say the creator clearly has no regard for the time of its viewers. This 2-hour-25-minute beast of a film only has 38 camera cuts in its entire runtime. How do I know? Because I counted (after getting thirty minutes in and realizing I could count the number so far on one hand). That's an average of just under four minutes per cut. Now, I have no problem with long takes- The Vast of Night is one of my favorite films, and that's famous for its long tracking shots- but the problem with Werckmeister Harmonies is that NOTHING HAPPENS in most of these shots, and even in the ones that do, several minutes could have been cut off and nothing would have been lost.

Let me give you some examples. One scene is a single tracking shot of the protagonist, Janos, taking a walk and talking with his uncle, with the camera following them with their faces in closeup. They finish their conversation, and then continue walking... for TWO SOLID MINUTES of silence before they reach their destination. MANY scenes end with all of the actors walking offscreen, only for the camera to linger on the empty room or door or wall or whatever for ten or more seconds before cutting to the next scene. If a scene has a character doing some mundane task, like cooking and eating some soup, you better expect to see the entire process done on-camera, likely with no dialogue, from beginning to end until they're finished and then they move on to do something else. There is a THREE MINUTE SCENE of Janos going and telling a pair of children to go to bed- during the scene, one of the children does nothing but jump on the bed and bang two cymbals together, and the other child spends half of the scene repeating the phrase "I will not go easy on you!" into an oscillating fan, long after Janos has left the scene.

While so much of the film seems to be about this impending riot, all of the scenes showing the townspeople are completely devoid of anything that could be called "action"- one long tracking shot has Janos walking past dozens of men in the town square standing around, not talking, not moving, not doing anything resembling expressing civil unrest, and a later scene (after the riot is supposed to have started) again shows the same square with the same dozens of men standing around, not talking, not moving, not doing anything resembling unrest. And then there's a FOUR-MINUTE SHOT of a crowd of rioters marching to go engage in rioting, but none of them are talking, none of them are expressing anything, they're just marching along in utter silence. (And their destination seems to be... a hospital? It's made especially bizarre because the entire scene of them destroying the hospital- the ONE instance of something actually HAPPENING in this film- similarly has not a single line of dialogue, not a single vocalization from anybody, so despite watching and hearing them smash things and pull people out of their beds to beat them, none of these victims make so much as a peep.) And then, the most exciting parts of the so-called "riot" end up being read to us by Janos from a journal he found the morning after. (The fact that the director wants us to believe that one of these rioters took the time to sit down and journal about destroying a local business and gang-raping the employees, then left the journal at said destroyed business, says all you need to know about the level of thought that went into this movie.)

I'll repeat it again: whoever made this film has no respect for my time, your time, or anybody else's time. NOTHING in this film has a sense of urgency: not an action, not a line of dialogue, nothing. It literally feels like in some cases they had a minimum amount of time they had to hit for every scene (and in other cases, like they just left the cameras rolling and they cut whenever they ran out of film). So to see all of these other reviews talking about how transformative this film was, or how visionary the director is, just makes me lose a little bit of faith in humanity. I understand slow burns- what I don't understand is movies where nothing actually catches fire but everyone acts like it did.

Anything this movie has to say, could have been said in one tenth of the time while also being said ten times better.

This movie sucks.

Overall Rating: 1/10 Hack Directors

Real Talk: This movie made me so angry I made a Metacritic account just so I could upvote the negative reviews. I regret nothing