The Exterminating Angel (1962)
Directed by Luis Buñuel
After a lavish dinner party, the guests find themselves unable to depart... and, over the next few days, all of their elaborate societal pretenses and façades deteriorate as they are reduced to living like animals.
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What critics compared The Exterminating Angel to
Too bad it gets repetitious, but not in a good way, like, say, Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel.
And strangely—as if the characters were trapped in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962)—the Cowans appear to be unable to leave the Longstreets’ apartment.
Watching "Carnage," I couldn't help thinking about, in reverse alphabetical order, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," "Six Degrees of Separation," "Lord of the Flies" and "The Exterminating Angel."
As for Polanski, he masterfully orchestrates all the mind-game mayhem — at times, the scenario recalls a more grounded version of Luis Bunuel's surrealist romps The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie — although he above all filmmakers constantly reminds us how important it is to separate the artist's personal life from his public offerings.
Then they have trouble leaving one another's company — any relation to Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel is worth speculating on.
Nothing gives this trick away (the superb if limited production design is by Dean Tavoularis, of "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now"), but the awareness of this illusion likely helped the actors embrace the story's absurd theatrical conceit, which merges the verbal sadomasochism of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" with the why-don't- they-just-leave-the-room unreality of Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel."
My favorite sequence was a snappy reference to Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece The Exterminating Angel in a hilarious encounter between Gil and the elite director.
Allen tweaks cinematic history by having Gil suggest the plot of "The Exterminating Angel" to Dali's pal Luis Bunuel (Adrien de Van, "In My Skin") who fails to see any sense in it while Man Ray (Tom Cordier) finds nothing odd about Gil's tale of time travel ('But you're a surrealist!' replies Gil).
There, he boozes it up with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll, killing it), finds a first reader for his manuscript in Gertrude Stein (Bates), and on a lark pitches future filmmaker Luis Buñuel the plot of the eternally baffling The Exterminating Angel ("But what does it mean?!" Buñuel puzzles after him – indeed).
After the stroke of midnight, Gil is transported to the Paris of the 1920s, where he rubs psyches with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Dali, Luis Bunuel, et al. (There's a playful allusion to Bunuel's classic The Exterminating Angel, 1962).
And it’s in the film’s most irreverent, introspective moment that Gil pitches Buñuel the idea for the Spanish filmmaker’s own The Exterminating Angel , whose story, about upper-class types unable to leave the prison of their own making, is believable as an account of Gil’s own life.
Chaos, of course, will reign in Noé’s film, which takes place in a kind of purgatorial space not unlike the one at the center of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel , where a privileged group is unable—or, more likely, unwilling—to leave a drawing room that comes to reflect a world’s ills.
In a year where masters from Paul Verhoeven to Cristi Puiu have invoked Buñuel, Ade’s absurdist brunch gathering might actually come the closest to the Spanish master’s mixture of satirical, carnivalesque glee and purple-bruised humanity—it’s the beggar’s banquet from Viridiana (1961) and the suffocating social obligation of The Exterminating Angel (1962) rolled into one, literally stripped naked, and then topped off with an intrusion from a creature from another time, place, and dimension, one whose arrival has been hinted at all along, and whose fundamental, what-the-fuck incongruity is sturdily supported by the context of absolute realism that Ade builds for two-and-a-half hours.
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Seth Reiss and Will Tracy’s script landed on the 2019 Black List, and it’s easy to see why: with its trapped-diners premise and the evisceration of those with power, it’s “The Exterminating Angel” for the franchise era.
Although Byrkit confines his actors and his largely unscripted story to the house, “Coherence” soon reveals its true setting to be some nocturnal twilight zone located at the juncture of Luis Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” and Shane Carruth’s “Primer,” all superior exercises in cine-surrealism.
This is a less-is-more science fiction-horror tale, indebted to the original "The Twilight Zone" (particularly "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street") as well Luis Bunuel's " The Exterminating Angel ," as well as certain recent science fiction indies that I won't name here because I did, you'd immediately deduce the film's first big twist.
The first half of the film, in which the veneer of respectability at an outwardly dignified social function is brutally stripped away, is as mordantly funny as the similar trips that Luis Bunuel took viewers on in such films as "The Exterminating Angel" and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" while the second is as legitimately touching and graceful a passage of filmmaking as Von Trier has ever presented and demonstrates that he can indeed tell a story without relying on all the shock visuals or off-putting distancing techniques that he has so often relied upon in the past.
Ultimately, Old is like Jaws without the horror and suspense or like The Exterminating Angel without the intellectual depth and imagination.
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Like “Cube,” “Saw,” and even “The Exterminating Angel” before it, “The Platform” is the sort of (largely) single-location horror movie that’s defined by its premise.
She's not cruel or highfalutin' like the ghouls from The Exterminating Angel and The Phantom of Liberty and her decision to take a job from two to five at Madame Anais's brothel isn't motivated by money but by a need to be.
His greatest film was “The Exterminating Angel,” about a group of intelligent socialites whose imprisonment at a dinner party reduces them to basic – and uncouth – human behaviors.