The great screen surrealist Luis Buñuel co-wrote and directed this dark, bitterly witty satire. A group of people in formal dress arrives at an elegantly appointed home for a dinner party. However, once dinner is over and the guests retire to the drawing room, they discover that the servants have gone away, and for some reason they cannot leave. There is no explanation why -- there are no locked doors or barred windows preventing them from going home -- but the guests are convinced that they're
stranded. Left to their own devices, they slowly but gradually degenerate into genteel savagery, taking an axe to a water pipe for drinking water, killing and eating a sheep that was to be part of the post-dinner entertainment, hiding the bodies of dead guests in the closet, dabbling in witchcraft, and burning the furniture. Buñuel's dry, quixotic wit is abundantly displayed in this film. Leading the cast was Silvia Pinal, the renowned actress who starred in several of Buñuel's Mexican films (she was married to noted producer Gustavo Alatriste, who produced several films with Buñuel). Other than the short subject Simon of the Desert, El Angel Exterminador proved to be Buñuel's last film made in his adopted homeland. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
My feeling is that his canvas is too narrow and his social comment too plain to keep our interest fixed upon his people and their barren stewing for an hour and a half.
Though less popular than other works, this is one of Bunuel's most philosophically profound and eccentric films, bearing undeniably disturbing effects on the viewers.
One of Luis Bunuel's masterworks, The Exterminating Angel is a brilliant surrealist allegory about a group of socialites who, inexplicably find themselves unable to leave their host's house, and gradually degenerate into violence and depravity.
This movie criticizes the strangeness of etiquette with a hyperbolic tale of social rules gone wrong. No one can convince themselves to leave, apparently because no one else has left. Its not as though these rules of propriety have turned us into sheep, its that we were sheep to begin with, and these individuals with
their nuanced rules are self-blinded of the suffering society around them. As time passes, or is made entirely meaningless, civility is eroded and these people are revealed to be the horny, hungry, irritable and fearful animals found in the rest of the animal kingdom and social classes. It took someone with a bit of free spirit who very early in the movie, before the whole trapped issue, lashes out by breaking a window for no explicit reason. She locks herself in a closet. People are murmuring to each other how she's still a virgin. They try so hard to turn everyone else into sheep just like them. They are fortunate that they failed.
A weird satirical piece of work that's thoroughly watchable & fairly enjoyable. Surrealistic movies are generally not my cup of tea, but thankfully, there's more to it here than merely surrealism.
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