Critics reviews

The coronation of a sparse but vertically momentous career of a veritable giant of soviet cinema. . . . The film is pockmarked with allegorical leads but decomposes every narrative cue into a lysergic Bosch-like morass, from which it’s impossible to emerge unscathed. Hypnotic traveling shots capture a world of unspeakable cruelty as if it’s unfolding in real time.

The late filmmaker's anguished excavation of all that is venal, cruel, and idiotic in the human character is also graceful and bitterly funny. Despite the film's categorical absence of nostalgia, it's a fitting swan song for the Petersburg auteur, an uncannily conjured purgatory of the dissident that mocks our search for significance beyond its glut of perfectly honed details.

The final film by the Russian master Alexsei German is an incredibly dense odyssey through humanity at its most grotesque. It's a tour de force of exquisitely choreographed clutter with things coming at the viewer from all angles, threatening to overwhelm the camera in sensory overload.

The result is one of the most immersive and harrowing cinematic experiences going, three hours of being put to the sword and mired in the mud, blood and viscera of a nightmare alternate reality.

Hard to Be a God is the last film the Russian director Aleksei German ever made – and while you're watching it, it feels like it might be the last film you will ever see. German's picture pulses with an occult and breath-choking finality, as if both civilisation and sense are unravelling around you as you watch.

The film is many things, from an avant-garde variation of the sort of mystical-historical revisionism of Game of Thrones to a vision of what a Tarkovsky film might look like if made by a misanthrope. Despite the reference points, however, the film is a wholly original work by one of modern cinema's least classifiable talents.

The world of Hard to Be a God has no context, no past or future—only a horrible, self-defeating now. This is expressed by German via one of the more impressive stretches of sustained present-tense cinematography in the medium's lifespan—an I Am Cuba-by-way-of-On the Silver Globe use of a roaming wide-angle camera eye. It's a camera that stays alongside Don Rumata, almost always keeping him in the frame and seeing the muck and grime that he sees, without ever actually adopting his perspective.

The narrative of God can be difficult to follow, since so many stray details are vying for one's attention, but the film's opacity is deliberate. Not only that, it's essential to German's artistic achievement: God is a meditation on humankind's propensity for barbarism, and German made this horrible aspect of our nature indigestible.

...The overall tone here is closer to something like SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM in its unbearable bleakness. It is unlikely that either Pasolini or German knew these movies would be their last but the extremism with which they approached form and content lends each film the feeling of a final testament in hindsight; when creating a work of art entails jumping into an abyss, sometimes no encore is imaginable.

Tempting as it is to extend the Malick comparison – it feels more like an inversion of the American poet's style than a compliment – a more useful reference point might be Andrzej Żuławski's half-finished post-punk sci-fi odyssey On The Silver Globe. In that kindred film, memories are recorded on panes like antique photographs. In both films, you become an unremarked upon character in every scene, a sensation helped by people often staring into the lens.

I don't think any film has ever depicted a world so awful with such conviction... German works in crisp black and white with long, incredibly elaborate tracking shots—as hypnotic and as beautifully choreographed as anything in Tarkovsky or Bela Tarr, but chaotic, even antic in a way theirs never are.

The film's credits list two cinematographers (Vladimir Ilin and Yuriy Klimenko) and four camera operators, though it manages a remarkable visual consistency, space distinctly delineated into multiple planes by light and shadow as in a film by Von Sternberg, if Von Sternberg had ever decided to make a film about the scrofulous inhabitants of a sodden, squelching pigsty planet.