The whale: "Werckmeister Harmonies"

From a distance, 2000's Werckmeister Harmonies - flagship film of Curzon's touring Béla Tarr retrospective, launching this week - might appear a two-and-a-half-hour footnote to the seven-hour Sátántangó: once more, the same close-knit creative team - director Tarr and co-writers Ágnes Hranitzky and the novelist László Krasznahorkai - are observed considering man's insignificance when set against the vastness of the universe. (It's not just the long, measured takes that make Tarr's films those most commonly set in opposition to superhero movies: their characters, weighed down by recognisably earthly fears and doubts, are too burdened to fly, and for all the false prophets circling them, no-one is going to swoop in and save them from their sorry fates.) Yet WH develops its makers' accursed-world theory in new and equally compelling directions. For starters, the film takes its title from a strain of music theory that insists that, somewhere in their passage to our ears, the notes passed down to us from the heavens were falsified and corrupted by man, such that there can no longer be anything like a true masterpiece or real harmonies - a gloomy line of thought that will nevertheless ring true to anyone who's had to listen to a lot of Westlife. 

The physical elements of this world aren't dissimilar to those of Sátántangó: lots of fog, a lot more trudging, several rounds of beer, as the characters seek to drown plentiful sorrows. Yet there have been developments here, too. Werckmeister actively dramatises the apocalypse that lay just over the horizon in its predecessor, cued here by the arrival of a travelling sideshow, with its centrepiece of a giant whale's carcass. Our protagonist, a student open-minded enough to try and replicate the rotations of the cosmos in a bar with spinning drunks as planets, greets the newcomers with excitement, but everyone else reacts on a scale ranging from abject indifference to outright loathing ("it'll only lead to trouble") in ways that would appear to mirror modern attitudes to immigration: it may be telling that this creative partnership was formed in the mid 1990s, when the question of how the New Europe might function was first being framed and posed. It's possible to see in the birth of the film's "Clean Town Movement" something of the resurgence of the far right; only a fragile alliance of the young and the town's womenfolk stands between civilisation and the darkness being brought about by men set in their ways. In Sátántangó, the townsfolk trudged in lonely ones, twos and threes; here, they march in mobs. Still, the film is too timeless to be entirely specific in its allegory: it dramatises the excesses and idiocies that have been with us since the year dot. Scene by scene, Tarr balances extraordinary widescreen spectacle with revealing trivia, affording as much weight to the whale's fate as he does the student's lunch preparations, and somehow making both gripping, partly because this director makes us genuinely fear what lies around the corner: more of the same, or the very end of the world. At the turn of the 21st century, nobody else on the planet - perhaps nobody else in the universe - was making movies like this.

Werckmeister Harmonies returns to selected cinemas from Friday; it is available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema.