The Exterminating Angel

A bourgeois dinner curdles when the guests realize they cannot leave in Luis Buñuel’s daring Surrealist assault on the hypocrisy of the ruling class and organized religion. The top hats are barely off (and the servants have pointedly left) by the time these high-society diners realize they can’t, in fact, go anywhere, leading to a quick switch from aristocratic manners to panic, violence, animal interventions, death, and utter, glorious chaos. Darkly comic and pointed yet universal in its attacks, this is “the most distinctly and completely Surrealist film since L’age d’or” (Francisco Aranda); “perhaps the best explanation for Exterminating Angel,” Buñuel remarked, “is that, reasonably, there isn’t one.”

—Jason Sanders

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