Critics reviews

Tarr seems determined to mire his audience in the same slow, sticky morass that his characters are trapped in... Far from boring, Tarr instead invites us to commiserate with [them]. He might be miserable, but he’s no nihilist — in the end, the act of creation is reason enough to go on.

[A] bleary-eyed, existentially bleak tragicomedy... Tarr’s films can be despairing, but they are also reminders that great art is never truly depressing... “Damnation,” a breakthrough work for [the director], now plays like a prelude to his later, longer masterpieces.

A good entry point for anyone new to Tarr’s exacting filmmaking techniques, Damnation... is also essential viewing for those more familiar with Tarr’s work since the film marks a key evolution in the filmmaker’s career... His is an arthouse aesthetic grounded in keen but timeless observation.

“Damnation” is something like a meteorological event... The movie is a brilliant calling card. Its melancholy, hurdy-gurdy score, exaggerated sound design, ritual ensemble dances, inexorable camera moves suggest a dry run for Tarr’s 1994 masterpiece, the immersive, seven-hour “Satantango” — at less than one-third the length.

The basic theme of all of Tarr’s films is entrapment, and starting with Damnation, the settings grow dire, where hopelessness is but a stone’s throw from utter madness and baser instincts of survival and betrayal reign.

If its grey aura of despair sometimes hangs a mite heavily, it's certainly worth persevering with for a pay-off that is as perverse as it is powerful... It's the absolutely assured direction that's most impressive.

The drab decay, no less moral than material... is so beautifully composed that no cinephile will begrudge Tarr the occasional longueur... Nobody subjects humanity to doom-laden fatalism quite like Tarr, and Damnation is unmissable for fans of the auteur's oeuvre, or of mud-spattered miserabilism in general.

Long after Gabor Medvigy's meandering monochrome images have faded, the unrelenting bleakness of Bela Tarr's study of an all-encompassing obsession will linger in the mind... [Damnation] exercises a compulsion that is never diminished by its pessimism... This intense picture could almost be called an apocalyptic film noir.

Imagine mating the quotidian impulses of early Jarmusch with Lynch’s baroque chiaroscuro in some of kind of post-Communist Double Indemnity, and you’d wind up not far from Damnation, the most narratively rigorous (while still remaining tantalizingly oblique) and least lengthy of Tarr’s films that I’ve seen.

Damnation is devoted to noir tropes but stretches each familiar-seeming moment into a long-running, slow-moving, somnambulistic shot that will be familiar to Tarr’s fans.

Miserabilist though its theology might be, there is a weird and mesmeric quality in Damnation. It induces a floating trance-like sensation like something to be found in Tarkovsky... It is arresting cinema.