“Few filmmakers can make cinema feel so alive, so strange and so open to the possibilities of existence”

Carlos Reygadas is back, and Heil Jupiter! feels like a return to the kind of cinema that only he seems interested in making. It is completely new, but at the same time there is something immediately familiar in its images, its bodies, its strange sounds and its refusal to explain itself. From the opening, Reygadas begins experimenting with colour and music, creating a mood before giving us anything that resembles a clear narrative. He has described this ordering as coming to him almost entirely by intuition: colour first, then sound, an approach he half-jokingly called pre-monotheistic, a way of letting the audience de-conceptualize the images before they arrive, to encounter them as living matter rather than as ideas. This is a fitting introduction to a film that seems determined to take us beyond our usual ways of seeing and understanding. Then comes the sea, constantly changing in appearance and mood. It can be beautiful, threatening, peaceful or simply strange. For Reygadas, it is the edge of what we know, always in motion, indifferent to us, and when I pointed out that it now recurs across three of his films, he seemed genuinely surprised he hadn’t noticed the pattern himself. Like much of the film, it seems less like a setting than something with a life of its own.

The invented language is one of the film’s most fascinating ideas. It takes away the usual comfort of understanding dialogue and forces us to pay attention to faces, bodies, gestures and sounds. Reygadas has said the choice was less about impossibility, since the film could easily have been shot in Spanish, than about effect: an unrecognisable language can’t be judged for its accent, its era or its jargon, so it strips communication down to something he wants to stay universal and endlessly rewritable, even past the point of shooting. The pockets of Spanish that survive, especially in the trial sequence, are there by design; he believes the particular can be a gate to the universal rather than a threat to it. In the trial, his intent was to let a shared, transparent language stop making sense at the exact moment it’s being spoken most clearly, exposing our need for total control over a world that is fundamentally indeterminate. The language sometimes creates distance, but that distance is also part of the film’s unusual power. We are denied the comfort of words and have to find our own way through the images, allowing their meaning to emerge slowly, sometimes long after a scene has ended. Reygadas trusts the viewer to experience the film before attempting to explain it, and this trust gives Heil Jupiter! a freedom that is increasingly rare in cinema. Its images do not always lead us towards a clear conclusion; they open up possibilities that continue to move in the mind.

The body, however, is where Reygadas remains most fascinating. He looks at the human body in ways that feel completely his own, and he was explicit about this in conversation: the body, to him, is a place, never a subject, something to be explored rather than owned or interpreted. He resists the shame that has historically been attached to nudity and sexuality on screen and says so plainly. In Heil Jupiter!, the body is not simply physical. It becomes a place where desire, pain, identity, tenderness and something almost cosmic can exist together. At times, it feels as if Reygadas is trying to show us the universe from inside the body, not as an abstract idea but as a living, breathing reality. The scene involving Ms. Trueba is particularly memorable. She talks about having had breast surgery three times and wanting another one, and later the doctor’s embrace gives the moment an unexpected tenderness. Reygadas told me that none of it is planned by the characters themselves: what begins as a rational, almost clinical conversation about health and consent gives way, within the scene’s own logic, to curiosity and warmth. He does not seem interested in explaining her identity to us. He simply observes the body and the complicated relationship people can have with it. Some of the film’s most moving moments come from this refusal to judge or explain, allowing people to exist on screen with all their contradictions intact.

The sound is another major strength. The film makes the earth itself feel mysterious, as if there are sounds beneath the visible world that we have never learned to hear. Reygadas calls this a geological sound, and he traces it to how he writes: the film was pre-visualized as complete images from the start, sound and texture included, not added later to support a narrative already fixed in place. This approach makes the film feel less like a sequence of scenes than a living environment in which images, sounds, colours and bodies constantly affect one another. The bodycam imagery creates an interesting contrast. Its rough, immediate quality gives the film a sense of realism, while also suggesting a digital dystopia in which bodies and landscapes are constantly being observed. Reygadas connects this directly to how we absorb violence now: the footage shows the same violence we’ve always exerted on each other, but for the first time delivered from the perpetrator’s own vantage point, which he thinks accounts for how raw it feels simply because it’s too new for us as a species to have processed yet. This mixture of the primitive and the technological is one of the film’s most compelling tensions. The slaughterhouse sequence takes that tension somewhere darker. It connects animals, bodies, violence and power in an unsettling way, without settling into a single, easily understood metaphor. Reygadas insists this isn’t a code to crack; he calls it intuitive rather than cryptic, and ties it to the film’s larger preoccupations with free will and education as a hidden source of fear and repression. The sequence stays with us precisely because it refuses to become a closed statement. Its meaning remains uncertain, but the images have already done their work.

That openness is central to Heil Jupiter! and to the way Reygadas approaches cinema. He has created such a personal cinematic language that the film sometimes seems to exist entirely within its own universe, asking us to surrender to its rhythms rather than search for conventional narrative connections. There are passages where this makes the film challenging, even frustrating, but I found that the uncertainty also deepened my experience of it. The images do not always have the same weight, and some of the ideas remain more felt than fully developed. Yet the film’s unevenness never cancels out its extraordinary moments. Instead, the shifts between intimacy, violence, beauty and strangeness create an unpredictable experience, one that cannot be reduced to a single interpretation. Reygadas is candid about not wanting to calculate how much trust he’s asking of an audience, comparing it to trying to fix a percentage of viewers who need to connect for the film to have succeeded. It is a position that makes sense within his larger philosophy. He does not seem interested in directing the audience towards one correct response. He wants to create the conditions for an encounter, leaving us free to discover what the film might mean to us. This is also where his cinema becomes most personal: it does not simply present a world, but asks us to reconsider how we look at the world around us.

There is something remarkable about the way Reygadas moves between the intimate and the enormous. He can place a human body beside a vast landscape and make both seem equally mysterious. He can move from tenderness to violence, from the sea to a slaughterhouse, from the physical world to the digital image without making these opposites feel entirely separate. He described the whole film, finally, as a kind of deep rhythm, a single energy of beauty running up against human stupidity, which is as close as he came to naming a unifying idea behind the whole project. This tension gives the film much of its force. Beauty is never simply decorative here, nor is violence merely an interruption of it. They belong to the same world, existing beside each other in ways that we may find difficult to accept or understand. The film’s strange images and sounds gradually become part of this larger rhythm, and even when I could not fully grasp what a particular scene was doing, I remained drawn to the world it was creating. There is a rare freedom in a film that allows such uncertainty to remain alive instead of resolving it into a neat conclusion.

Reygadas has spent his career developing a cinematic language that feels unmistakably his own, and Heil Jupiter! continues that search rather than simply repeating his earlier films. The film took nearly eight years and five countries to reach this form, under different titles along the way; the script, written in 2020, stayed fixed as a compass point even as the film kept becoming, in his own word, through shooting, editing and sound. It is a difficult, strange and occasionally uneven work, but its strongest moments are difficult to find elsewhere. The body becomes a universe, the earth becomes sound, the sea keeps transforming, and technology becomes another way of looking at human existence. What stays with me most is not the need to decipher every image, but the feeling of having encountered a filmmaker who continues to push cinema towards something unknown. Reygadas does not always make his ideas easy to grasp, and the film asks us to leave behind many of the expectations we bring to the screen. For me, that is part of its achievement. Heil Jupiter! is not simply a film to understand but one to inhabit, to feel and to return to in thought. Its mysteries do not disappear when the film ends; they continue to unfold, and with every return, the experience seems to grow larger. Few filmmakers can make cinema feel so alive, so strange and so open to the possibilities of existence. With Heil Jupiter!, Reygadas has made a film that is deeply moving, formally daring and unforgettable.