I recently watched Werckmeister Harmonies. It didn’t exactly astonish me. I’d seen Sátántangó before, and the long takes in that film felt far more grounded and powerful. Here, they come off a bit too formalized. If we say the protagonist and his uncle are traveling down different paths, then those long takes of him visiting the whale can be seen as key moments or turning points—those still feel convincing. But when there are too many of them, everything flattens into a kind of uniformity.

What dissatisfied me most was the handling of the Prince. The character feels overly symbolic. I understand the intention to create an aura of mystery, but his concrete influence on the town’s breakdown never quite registered for me, making him feel somewhat hollow. The riot of the rabble has a similar issue. Even when it begins, it’s oddly affectless; the earlier buildup never felt specific or substantial enough.

When the mob enters the nursing home and suddenly begins smashing things, only to stop abruptly when confronted with the corpse-like naked old man—this felt a bit forced to me (it even reminded me of Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry and its use of elderly nudity). In short, the long takes become too uniform, and the characters—perhaps intentionally rendered as a mindless crowd in service of an allegorical tone—end up feeling without contour, overly abstract.