The Exterminating Angel (1962), Luis Buñuel

 

What was supposed to be a lavish dinner party in an aristocratic mansion, turns into an inexplicable and macabre satire of human nature and a nurturing of savagery.

'The Exterminating Angel' sets up an inexplicable allegory whose awkwardness dawns upon your instincts to subtly put you in a state of awe.

Bunuel's manipulation of the viewer's perception on the motive of the setup is seemingly easy on the crust. However the unraveling of the dramatic layers, gives an impending sense of a complex subtext.

There's not much on the film's briefing as the simple inability of a group of people to exit a room is actually the play in effect. On the contrary, the unfolding of the acts, provide us enough layers to dissect and interpret the play in motion.

The unreasonable force holding the people in a room, works on both grounds; in the examinations of uncovering humane morality and restrictions, keeping them to be socially acceptable and also becoming the cause of enacting the touch of allegorical surrealism and absurdity of Bunuel.

Luis Bunuel's morbid satire is a brilliant and cruel setting of seemingly three phases of human tolerance, that eventually points to hopelessness.

The three subsequent levels that Bunuel's characters are manipulated into are - apathy, annoyance or anger and antagonism.

Bunuel's playwright brilliance of the film reflects in his technicality of juxtaposing graphic and allegoric absurdity into a setting of purposeful realism.

As already perceivable, the exploration of the successive layers of human tendencies is one grand and artistic experiment, keeping in the controversial elements of incestuous behavior and even a minimal and subtle indication of class dissidence, if not utterly prominent.

The comically saturated dramatics of the progressive acts scour away from using deliberate political emblems like what has been used in 'The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie', and just focuses on retaining the ulterior motive of Bunuel to erode the semblance of civility and it's potentiality in the providence of a deadpan comic relief, surpasses any of the master's other works.