“If Against Nature ultimately becomes a profane, or, perhaps more fittingly, an all-too-human meditation on the religious experience of love, it is because love itself can never be experienced here without first being contaminated by our own capacity for wrongdoing.”

“And there beyond the grave, we shall say that we have known suffering and tears, that our life was bitter. And God will pity us.” — Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov

As Axel Bertha’s Against Nature (Contra la Naturaleza) came to an end, I couldn’t help but notice a thread running through its contemplative narrative, one that also weaves through other works such as Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light (2007) and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011). Each, in its own way, searches for a secular understanding of the religious experience. Or perhaps more precisely, each attempts to grasp Christ’s words, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind… And you shall love your neighbor as yourself”, through resolutely earthly terms.

Reygadas approaches this spiritual turmoil by grounding his cinema in the phenomenon of time and in the inexorable passage through which everything is eventually taken from us. It is perhaps there that beauty emerges. In his films, religious transcendence is experienced not through miracles but through impermanence itself: everything appears miraculously beautiful precisely because everything is doomed to disappear, not in spite of it. Malick, by contrast, not only in The Tree of Life but also in To the Wonder (2012), locates the same spiritual force in human loneliness. “You shall love,” after all, remains a commandment rather than a choice or a suggestion. Constantly crushed beneath the weight of our own existence, increasingly estranged from one another, perhaps we reach a point where extending a hand to another person becomes less demanding than continuing to drift through a sea of solitude.

In Against Nature, however, Bertha appears at first glance to subvert the injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Yet a closer reading reveals what may be the most earthbound interpretation of them all. If, in Christian mythology, God became human through the Incarnation, then He also condemned Himself to experience the violence and chaos of human nature. Humanity is an animal that does not belong, yet possesses the language and tools to reshape the natural world into grotesque reflections of itself. Where Malick reaches upward and Reygadas inward, Bertha directs his gaze downward, toward the earth, the stones, and the dirt beneath our feet that will, sooner or later, receive our bodies.

Needless to say, it is the natural world, its rocks, trees, animals, and flowing water, that occupies most of Bertha’s frame. Human beings, by contrast, are almost always observed from a distance: fragile creatures wandering aimlessly through a landscape that neither acknowledges nor accommodates them. Billions of minor gods adrift in a universe indifferent to their existence, yet painfully aware that they have been left to fend for themselves. If Against Nature ultimately becomes a profane, or, perhaps more fittingly, an all-too-human meditation on the religious experience of love, it is because love itself can never be experienced here without first being contaminated by our own capacity for wrongdoing. Salvation is impossible precisely because there is no God left to offer the sacrifice. We are the gods now. Bertha’s characters can therefore experience only the emptiness of the human condition and the violence humankind unleashes in its futile attempt to escape it.

This becomes clear through two questions the film quietly poses: Why do we feel so alien to this world? And who, or what, has taught us to hate it so deeply? If the same God created both humanity and the world it inhabits, should we not feel at home within His creation rather than estranged from it?

Bertha’s observational method unfolds through a succession of fragments which, taken together, gradually construct the film’s central argument: brutality is the only language we truly know. After all, if each of us has become a minor god, the history of gods has never been one of peaceful coexistence. We refrain from killing not because violence is foreign to us, but because we know, with equal certainty, that we ourselves can be killed at any moment. Violence, then, possesses no ontology of its own. It is neither an external force nor an autonomous being waiting to seize us. It is our nature and, as Against Nature relentlessly suggests, maybe the real proof of our very existence.

Perhaps the clearest way to understand the relationship between humanity and violence in Bertha’s film is through a dialogue with the figure of the witness in Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s work. For Agamben, the true witness to catastrophe is not the survivor who lives to recount it, but the one who never returns. The ultimate testimony lies not in the story that can still be told, but in disappearance itself, in death, which exposes the impossibility of narrating senseless violence from within it. Bertha seems acutely aware of this paradox. By fragmenting his narrative, he refuses not only to justify the acts of violence his characters commit but even to explain them. Violence simply erupts, stripped of psychology or causality, as though explanation itself would betray its essential incomprehensibility.

It is within this fractured structure that Jonás (Jonathan Zárate) returns to the countryside to work as a stonemason. Religion quietly permeates both his life and that of his family. People till the land, dance, tend to animals, slaughter them, and bow their heads in prayer before meals. A grieving couple buries the body of their child beneath a pile of stones. These are not scenes arranged into a conventional narrative but fragments of a harsh existence, observed one after another with almost ethnographic patience. Time passes almost imperceptibly, carrying everything toward the same inevitable end. It is difficult not to think here of how Cormac McCarthy describes the slowly encroaching end of the world in The Road: “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world”. That is, the world ends without fanfare or ceremony, for only we ever knew we existed. The universe, after all, never cared.