Directly translated into "Light After Darkness", Post Tenebras Lux starts with a stunning, highly memorable scene with an adorable, very young girl stomping around a large field in her wellies. Surrounded by dogs, horses and cows, the young girl is having fun until thunder clouds start rolling in, and she gets very frightened, calling out for her mum and dad. This hypnotic and highly atmospheric start is then ritualistically destroyed by being (A) a dream sequence, and (B) followed by two hours of pretentious, indecipherably experimental movie-making.
An upper class family consisting of Juan (Adolfo Jimenez Castro), his wife Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo), and their two children - one of whom we met earlier in that dream sequence - live in a fancy house at the top of a hill in a small town in Mexico. Their home overlooks the poorer folk in the town below, but they also employ some of the locals as nannies and groundskeepers. There is some tension between these two groups, which is never justifiable reasoned or explained, but it appears to be the backbone of the movie, as we watch Juan and Natalia's marriage struggle to survive against this supposedly inhospitable environment.
Writer/director Carlos Reygadas doesn't concern himself too greatly with the audience understanding what the movie is supposed to mean, as scenes just seem to come and go without much thought given to meaning, almost as if the movie is looking for its own definition as it goes along. There is some startling imagery - a man savagely beating a dog for what feels like forever, a pansexual orgy in a sauna - but understanding why any of these things exist in the movie is beyond the power of rational reasoning. Even if you're particularly artistically minded, trying to make sense of it will be a struggle, and that's before the out-of-nowhere ending which will have you sniggering in disbelief. This is, at best, a two hour art instillation without the luxury of context. At worst, it's everything that's wrong with art-house cinema.
