Silent Light (2007)

Director: Carlos Reygadas

Though it admittedly requires a great deal of patience to get through, Reygadas's third feature is a sensitive, mature film that capitalizes on the virtues of his previous work whilst eschewing its sensationalism and trading its pretentious obscurity for thoughtful complexity and ambiguity.

It focuses on the affair between Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), a married member of a religious sect, and Marianne (Maria Pankratz), and its repercussions. As usual with Reygadas, we experience things as the characters experience them, and that simple but affecting storyline means that this quality yields far greater results this time around: in one especially effective and typically understated scene, Johan gives his wife Esther (Miriam Teows) the heartbreaking news during an awkward car journey; the camera stares listlessly from the passenger seat out of the window at the rain as she does.

The meticulous time-lapse photography of dawn breaking in the astonishing opening scene sets the pace and tone: this is a very slow film (virtually static); but rich, and visually considered to a high degree.