Sátántangó

1994

7h 19m

Comedy

Drama

List

100%

Tomatometer

24 Reviews

92%

Audience Score

2,500+ Ratings

In Bela Tarr's seven-hour episodic film, inhabitants of a small village in Hungary deal with the effects of the fall of Communism. The town's source of revenue, a factory, has closed, and the locals, who include a doctor (Putyi Horvath) and three couples, await a cash payment offered in the wake of the shuttering. Irimias (Mihaly Vig), a villager thought to be dead, returns and, unbeknownst to the locals, is a police informant. In a scheme, he persuades the villagers to form a commune with him.

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Spencer Parsons

Austin Chronicle

You not only make it through but actually enjoy nearly eight hours of rainy, black-and-white bleakness about the failure of a communal farm, and you've earned significant envy in some quarters.

Rated: 4/5

Apr 30, 2020

Full Review

Dan Jardine

Slant Magazine

The food is delicious...but the portions are SO LARGE!

Rated: 86/100

Aug 1, 2010

Full Review

Nick Pinkerton

Village Voice

Its seven-hour runtime warns off dabblers, the one-screening-a-day bulk defies profit motive, and its protagonists -- Tarr's "poor, ugly, sad, and damned people" -- deny expectations of pleasure. It is also, at times, funny as hell.

Oct 20, 2009

Full Review

Susan Sontag

Artforum

Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours. I’d be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life.

May 2, 2024

Full Review

Angelos Koutsourakis

PopMatters

Satantango is about a collective farm in a village which is taken by Irimias and Petrina...again, formal experimentation, such as uninterrupted time images predominate over cause and effect narration.

Rated: 9/10

Feb 22, 2024

Full Review

Dennis Harvey

48 Hills

This maxi-minimalism is in service of an existentially bleak yet questing personal cinema...

Jul 18, 2023

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Simon T

Why do I prefer Bela Tarr's movies to anything by Tarkovsky? For all his stylistic quirks - the long takes, the relentless rain and mud, the grinding poverty of his characters - there is always a humanity beneath the surface, an understanding of human frailty. In this massive 7-hour epic he gives us a community who have lost their purpose and now drown their sadness in drink and wild dancing, failing to notice that one of their children has poisoned her pet cat and taken her own life. This in turn leads to a returning villager exploiting their grief and running off with all their money. You do have to surrender to the slow pacing of all Bela Tarr's films - I must admit that I found the final section testing - but they are endlessly rewarding and very different to anything you'll have seen before. And very beautiful too.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

02/23/24

Full Review

Sean H

This movie is like a 7 and a half hour of a constipated person trying to have a bowel movement. It's a disgust to any Hungarian who suffered the horrors of communism!!!! Shame on the reviewers!!!!

Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars

12/21/23

Full Review

J.J. L

I found a way to watch this film and not feel like I wasted time. I type this review while looking at it, I check email and surf my social media feed. I play solitaire. Try to do that at a cinema for 7 hours...

Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars

11/15/23

Full Review

Audience Member

I just lost a day forcing myself to watch this. There was a lot of fast forward going on but still it's a tedious waste of time. I only watched because it makes so many top 100 lists so it piqued my interest but jeez even by Béla Tarr standards this is self indulgent.

Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars

01/28/23

Full Review

ranjan d

By far the most engrossing film by any director i have seen in a8ng time. You never feel that passage of 7+ hours go by....Bela Tarrs Direction and film language is unique.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

03/30/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Giving this movie more than 1 Star is being overly generous to say the least. The 2nd star is only for the sake of one Character I found remotely entertaining and amusing and that was the Doctor. Had this film revolved around him entirely; I might have been able to endure the painful 7 1/2 hours of never-ending Torture of having watched it. And the only reason I managed to stumble across this bizarre work of Bela Tarr's was purely motivated on a dare by my Cinephile husband who swears by Tarr's genius. Unfortunately the only geniuses I recognized were the Poor Cows left to their own devices at the beginning of the film with nothing to do but look bored. I could relate to their muse more than any human being portrayed in this circle jerk of a chase for more money and change that never arrived at its destination. In the end everyone ended right back at square one only this time at a different location without a self sustaining farmland or their Cattle. Why anyone would abandon those cows to begin with remains a mystery...

Rated 2 out of 5 stars

02/18/23

Full Review

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Béla Tarr

Director

Mihaly Vig

Irimiás

Putyi Horvath

Petrina

János Derzsi

Kráner

Miklós B. Székely

Futaki

Erika Bok

Estike

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63%

%

Yellow Cat

89%

73%

Give Me Liberty

TRAILER

for Give Me Liberty

83%

%

Explanation for Everything

86%

%

The Interpreter

73%

93%

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Synopsis

In Bela Tarr's seven-hour episodic film, inhabitants of a small village in Hungary deal with the effects of the fall of Communism. The town's source of revenue, a factory, has closed, and the locals, who include a doctor (Putyi Horvath) and three couples, await a cash payment offered in the wake of the shuttering. Irimias (Mihaly Vig), a villager thought to be dead, returns and, unbeknownst to the locals, is a police informant. In a scheme, he persuades the villagers to form a commune with him.

Director: Béla Tarr
Producer: György Fehér, Joachim von Vietinghoff, Ruth Waldburger
Screenwriter: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Original Language: Hungarian
Release Date (DVD): Jul 22, 2008
Runtime: 7h 19m