Reseñas de la crítica

Buñuel’s work is very important to me because it made me understand how far you can go with imagination and still be so close to reality. For me, The Exterminating Angel is so real—maybe Buñuel wouldn’t be happy to hear me say that because he’s not famous for his realism. But even if it’s a surrealistic parable, I’ve been so many places where I felt like I was living inside the feeling of this movie.

This dreamlike fable about the complacency of the wealthy elite is as funny and frightening as any other film in his oeuvre, and features one of his all-time greatest endings.

Buñuel's refusal to explain how or why the guests cannot leave the room is The Exterminating Angel's biggest coup. Just as Buñuel attacks social convention through satire, so does he attack cinematic convention through surrealism. It's that audacity of invention and imagination that makes Buñuel's films as stylistically radical as they are socially radical, and as ineffable and miraculous as they are caustic.

Modeling claustrophobia as the price of refinement and pseudo-taste, the second most shocking thing about The Exterminating Angel is how aberrantly entertaining it is. Silvia Pinal, whom Buñuel catapulted to scandalous stardom a year before in Viridiana, manifests the puffed-up, neurotic entitlement of Diva-hood without upstaging Buñuel's judiciously selected ensemble of sophisticated blowhards and reactionary-chic matrons.

Buñuel indulges his more abstract side in a series of hallucinations that the guests suffer... The filmmaker's symbolism is anything but subtle, particularly in the invocation of sheep as fodder for both the voracious bourgeois guests and, in the last scene, a church that offers no respite for the civil unrest that erupts outside. Buñuel's blackly comic The Exterminating Angel depicts a society so in thrall to its power structures that revolution can only come about through supernatural means.

it was a case of love at first sight. Never had I been exposed to such a wonderful blend of realistic drama imbued with a slight but perceptible undercurrent of Surrealistic imagery, propelled relentlessly forward by absurdist logic... The following is an attempt to deliver an explanation without destroying the mystery of the film and the first flush of love it awoke in me for Buñuel's wonderful talent.

The film succeeds because it cunningly convinces the viewer that it's just normal enough to exist within the realm of logic (albeit that of a dream nature). In fact, part of the film's appeal results from the way it plays with the familiar tropes of the murder mystery and the hostage situation plot while simultaneously undermining linear storytelling conventions.

This movie is enormously expansive, and reveals new things at different times and to different viewers... I think one could even say that 'The Exterminating Angel' is an anarchist re-rendering of 'Last Year at Marienbad'... It's tempting maybe to call this film, or these strains of films, as satires, but in Buñuel's hands, and given his disposition and world-view, I think it's something closer to... I was going to say "parody," but that's not it -- it's something closer to profanation.

It's is one of Buñuel's most provocative and unforgettable works... Not only does this story undermine our confidence in our social institutions but it challenges our powers of cognition and perception, which are shown to be easily distorted by unreliable narratives. Perhaps most threatening, despite the emotional distance from the characters that Buñuel's satiric vision grants us, we are ultimately forced to see that we in the audience are also objects of his attack.

After Viridiana, Luis Buñuel collaborated with Luis Alcoriza for the first time since Fever Mounts in El Pao. The end result was the wicked, almost unclassifiable The Exterminating Angel... From the start, Buñuel is pointing out all manner of innate and prescribed modes of behavior, offering up this spectacle of human folly for our shocked bemusement.

A mesmerizing, richly symbolic, allegorical tale on the nature of human behavior: of masters and servants, of excess and want, and of fraternity and alienation.

Luis Buñuel's 1962 film takes an old Mexican proverb—"After 24 hours, corpses and guests smell bad"—and turns it into a marvelous satire on the life of the bourgeoisie.