The narrator informs of a story involving German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche who, upon seeing a horse whipped by his master near his country home in Turin in 1889, sunk into a deep, near inconsolable depression. The film then follows the cab driver to his desolate country home where he wallows in misery with his daughter, a scene we get to regard for the next three hours. After watching "The Turin Horse", supposedly the last film (fingers crossed) for acclaimed Hungarian director Bela Tarr, I quickly googled "synonyms for snail's pace" as I did not want to be insulting towards snails when referencing this films interminable plotting. When carping about Michael Bay films and the like, whose films contain a cut about every three seconds, we should be equally weary of faux art films like this, here containing only approximately thirty shots, feigning to tell a story, and dragging on seemingly forever. "The Turin Horse" is a resoundingly bleak and pretentious bore, which Tarr clearly thought was his great final statement. Maybe if he would have made the film about Nietzche.
