The first collaboration between what would become cinema's holy trinity of melancholia-director Tarr, composer Mihály Víg, and writer László Krasznahorkai-Damnation boasts a noirish plotline of marital infidelity, scheming lovers, smuggling scams, and murder, but, as always with Tarr, the plot is barely noticeable amid an atmosphere of stasis and decay so meticulously rendered as to almost ooze from the screen. "My films don't simply tell a story, they relate the world that surrounds it," Tarr has said. "Someone opens a door, we cut to the door. The entrance is the information. But an equally important piece of information is, what is the door like? In Damnation we continually leave the story to watch faces, or crumbling walls, or dogs, or the rain." Existing in a realm of rain–lashed nights, deserted countrysides, and dimly lit, windowless rooms, Damnation is Tarr's first movement away from traditional narrative, towards a cinema that holds the space around the plot in an almost mystical awe, where atmosphere, not language, is what defines and confines.