The Turin Horse, made by the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, is a black-and-white film with little dialogue that unfolds in an extremely slow, repetitive rhythm. Rather than simply telling its “story,” it becomes a narrative of the erosion of the world when no meaning or value remains except life itself.

The film is tied to a famous story: Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have seen a horse in Turin that had stopped moving under the blows of its owner’s whip; he embraced the horse and wept, and after this event suffered a psychological collapse. Rather than reconstructing that incident, however, the film turns to a deeper story bound up with some of the most fundamental foundations of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the life of an ageing man and his daughter, a horse that suddenly no longer “wants” to work, and a world that slowly begins to stop moving—water, food, conversation, sound, and even light.

At the beginning of the film, the wind arrives—not like a natural phenomenon, but like a decree. It is as though, through its persistence, it wears meaning away, swallows sound, and strips the world down to the bone of repetition. A world in which each day resembles the previous one, but not with the quality of calm—with the quality of exhaustion.

With a heavy and wearisome patience, the camera shows us how life can be reduced to an endless ritual of “continuing and repeating”: waking, dressing, going out into the wind, returning, sitting at the table, and eating hot potatoes with one’s hands simply to stay alive... wordless, without appetite, in silence.

And the horse no longer rebels, dies, bolts, or attacks. It simply no longer wants to obey. In its silent resistance, it reveals the futility of its owner’s will and sterile power to dominate.

Into this heavy silence Nietzsche enters, like a shadow standing behind every scene of the film.

The Turin Horse is an image of a world “after meaning”: a world that still exists, but whose invisible pillars—belief, hope, direction, and purpose—are removed one by one, leaving us before a truth that is by no means easy to watch.