Critics reviews

The film is smart enough to avoid suggesting that Juan is simplistically redeemed by his familial devotion or, on the contrary, that his sins taint his human potential; instead, Reygadas sidesteps the level of judgment entirely by evading the shackles of A-B narrative structure and inhabiting the schizophrenic consciousness of his lead character.

The first thirty minutes of the film are completely stunning: visually gorgeous, disturbing, moving, intriguing... But then something happens--an ambivalence, perhaps, on the part of the director about the message at the core of his fable--and the film morphs into something looser, lighter and less focused.

Though he has returned to the same preoccupations... time and again, sometimes with a singular obsession that grows tiresome, Reygadas here continually startles and delights. There's an intuitive quality to the filmmaking: perspectives shift and move invisibly and fluidly, and time seems not a concern at all. Reygadas grounds his formal play in recognizable roman à clef elements, so that even when [the film] is at its most obtuse, it isn't long before a pocket of relative lucidity arrives.

In Post Tenebras Lux... the family drama provides a crucial ballast for a film that swirls with impressionistic touches; it helps Reygadas hold his strange discordant notes mostly in balance. Mostly, but not entirely: It's as if Reygadas started with a sprawling cache of visual ideas and then tried to find some way to organize them all. The effect can be frustrating at times, but also surprising and beguiling.

Gradually the film takes on themes of creativity and violence, and what both things do to a family. Magnificent landscapes are filmed through a lens that blurs the edges — like the bottom of a bottle, alcohol being one of many motifs. For those willing to lock into Reygadas' mad wavelength, the beauty is worth the puzzlement.

Post Tenebras Lux" is less combative [than his earlier films], even with an abrasive sound mix, that often turns up natural noises (rain, boots on concrete, mooing) up to 11, and images that sometimes boast distortion around the edges. A second viewing takes it from free associational to fairly contained. It's the kind of art film that seems mysterious until a closer reading makes it feel smaller.

A mesmerizing combination of opaque art-house cinema, personal reflection and class-based rural thriller, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas' "Post Tenebras Lux" casts a strange and powerful spell... It's as if we were sometimes in the world of David Lynch, sometimes in the world of Stanley Kubrick and a whole lot of the time in the world of Andrei Tarkovsky, with the complicated social tragedy of Mexico ladled on top.

If I advise fewer people to see Reygadas's new film, Post Tenebras Lux [than Silent Light], it's not only because I liked it less than Silent Light—but also because it is so much harder to explain what exactly I am proposing that they watch... In Post Tenebras Lux, if we are hoping for the coherent narrative that drew us through Silent Light, we must instead settle for a montage of scenes that appear to have been assembled in an order understood best—and perhaps only—by the director.

Like recent films Upstream Color and Spring Breakers, Post Tenebras Lux embraces a psychedelic vibe that prizes sensual experience over conventional narrative, a trip that isn't always pleasant: Satan makes two cameos, and I don't think they're intended as jokes. Post Tenebras Lux doesn't achieve the stunning visuals of the opening scene of Reygadas's Silent Light (one of the past decade's masterpieces), but it remains a worthy follow-up.

Life and death, nature and culture, sex and money, man and beast, God and the Devil — "Post Tenebras Lux" embraces the world even if it doesn't open itself up to ready interpretation... Everything in the film may be in the past or may just be in the eternal, magnificent, maddening present that is Mr. Reygadas's consciousness.

Reygadas is no stranger to politically charged moviemaking (the climax here is an astonishingly unnerving and confrontational coup de cinema). What matters more is recognizing Post Tenebras Lux's kinship with a strain of impressionistic autobiographical cinema practiced by filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky (The Mirror) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) in which every sound and image seems to spring straight from the psyche.

Reygadas's taste in mentors is exemplary. If Carl Dreyer's Ordet (1955) was the unacknowledged inspiration behind Silent Light, Bresson's The Devil, Probably (1977) seems to have been on Reygadas's mind here, as a later scene of trees falling in a forest also suggests. To boot, Bresson's narrative also splits its focus between the suicidal trajectory of its main character and the indictment of a world bent on destroying its natural resources while offering pathetic cultural compensations.