Jackson Booth-Millard Directed by Luis Buñuel (Land Without Bread, Viridiana, Belle de Jour, Tristana, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), this Spanish film featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I hoped along with the positive reviews I read it would be deserved. Basically wealthy society couple Señor Edmundo Nobile (Enrique Rambal) and his wife Lucía (Lucy Gallardo) invite a group of twenty friends for formal dinner, following an evening at the opera, at their lavish mansion in Mexico City. The house servants one by one are called away or for various reasons leave the estate, and after dinners the guests adjourn to the music room where guest Blanca (Patricia de Morelos) plays the piano, and later when they may normally return home, the guests remove their jackets, loosen their gowns and settle down for the night on couches, chairs and the floor. In the morning, for an unknown reason, it is apparent they are trapped in the music room, not physically but psychologically, unable to leave the guests consume what little water and food they can find from the previous night's party. Days go by, the plight for the guests becomes intense, they quarrel, become hostile and hysterical, only Doctor Carlos Conde (Augusto Benedico) manages to keep his cool and with logic and reason guides the guests through the ordeal. Elderly guest Sergio Russell (Antonio Bravo) dies, his body is placed in a large cupboard, later a young couple due to be married, Beatriz (Ofelia Montesco) and Eduardo (Xavier Massé), lock themselves in a closet and commit suicide. Meanwhile the guests manage to find a water source, breaking through the wall and a water pipe, several sheep and a bear break loose from their bonds and find their way into the room, the sheep are taken and slaughtered and roasted. Dr. Conde reveals to Nobile that Leonora (Bertha Moss), one of his patients, is dying of cancer, a secret supply of morphine is used keep her fit, but the drugs are stolen by brother and sister Francisco (Xavier Loyá) and Juana (Ofelia Guilmáin). One of the guests Ana Maynar (Nadia Haro Oliva), a Jew and a practitioner of Kabbalah, fails to free the others performing a mystical ceremony. Eventually, Raúl (Tito Junco) suggests Nobile is responsible for their predicament and must be sacrificed, only Dr. Conde and noble Coronel Alvaro (César del Campo) oppose the angry mob, Nobile offers to take his own life, but then young foreign guest Leticia 'La Valkiria' (Silvia Pinal) sees everyone is in the same position as when it all began. On the instructions of Leticia the group reconstruct the conversations and movements from the night of the party and discover they are free to leave the room, local police and the servants are gathered outside the manor, they found themselves similarly unable to enter. To give thanks for their rescue, the guests attend a ceremony at the cathedral, when the service is over, the churchgoers and the clergy find that they are trapped, it is unclear if those trapped in the house before are now trapped again. The house guests seem to have disappeared, the situation is the church is followed by a street riot and the military step in, the last scene sees a flock of sheep entering the church, and the sound of gunshots. Also starring Jacqueline Andere as Alicia de Roc, Luis Beristáin as Cristián Ugalde, Claudio Brook as Julio the Steward, Rosa Elena Durgel as Silvia and Enrique García Álvarez as Alberto Roc. I admit the first twenty minutes or so I was gripped, it was just simply the gentle upper class party atmosphere, but once you realise the guests are trapped with seemingly no way out, becoming almost crazed and retracing their steps to solve the problem, it does become interesting, there were some stand out and chilling moments, overall it was a satisfyingly darkly comedic in part satirical drama. Good!

SeaHorseMafia People stuck in a room where they can't leave, physically nothing keeping in them in there, but they just can't get out. Now, that's a weird idea for a film. But it's not about a plot at all. It's a social satire, a criticism of bourgeois lifestyle and about the condition of human psychology and cinema itself. There is one questions that nobody can really answer, why can't they leave? It's never explained, and if it would be explained, the movie would be dumb as hell. It's the kind of story, or idea, that shouldn't be explained. Some people have a hard time accepting that fact about surrealism. You shouldn't understand it, it's meant to absurd, it's meant to mysterious. In one way you could look this movie as a post-modernist, there's no real answers to life and such, but I tend to say that this is a criticism about the class wars, social satire and surrealist piece of art. I'm not sure that Bunuel knew why couldn't they leave the room. I'm sure he knew that it wasn't important. Maybe it's criticizing cinema itself, how everything always have to have on answer and a reason. When maybe it shouldn't. Life is absurd, that's a line in the film, isn't it? And it's not taking itself seriously, the premise is so outrageous that it couldn't be taken seriously. Or one could look at it as a self-parody. It's a possibility that Bunuel was making fun at himself and surreal film in general. Again, it's so absurd and it's so weird, but it's acted with a straight face. And the direction is somewhat serious. Maybe he was making a huge joke on cinema and his movies. Those are some theories I have come up with. I still think at it's purest this is a social criticism and satire. All the help leave the place, for reason unknown, and the bourgeois people are left helpless. They can't function without the people, who they so look down upon. They treat them horribly, but when they leave, they are left helpless, like fish out of water. Also just how idiotic these people are, the doctor is the only one who keeps he's cool and tries to talk reason. All the other ones start to fight. Bunuel is making fun at the bourgeois lifestyle and what happens when they will have to sacrifice their lifestyle and "ethics". It's kinda like Lord of The Flies, except children are replaces by rich adults and the island is placed by a room in a mansion. Kinda similar premise, they will have to survive in a place with limited amount of food and drink. And they will have to try to live with each other, even though they are savages deep down. You could easily make this a bad horror movie, just say there's a demon that forces them to stay and there you go. But Bunuel never goes for any kind of horror. Maybe that's because it's meant to be an satire and Bunuel doesn't want to give a reason. There are a lot of things I don't understand. Like how a lot of the things are repeated, I simply don't understand that. Is it to show how meaningless their lives are and how they never change their routines? I don't know, the trapped in a room thing, could be a metaphor on how they are all living in their own world, how they live in this box (or a room) and how they don't break out from that.I'm going to try to makes sense on why couldn't they leave... Well, interestingly the people outside the mansion, are trying to help them, but can't get to the mansion. Nobody can't past the gates. The servants left early in the film, with no real explanation, maybe one of them had a real reason to leave and then they all kinda followed him. When the quests after the night are discussing on why didn't anybody leave, one of them states that because he didn't see anybody else leave. Didn't the couple agree to stay after everybody else has gone, so maybe because there was no one to be the first one to leave, none of them wasn't. You know when your in a party and you want to leave, but you don't want to be the first one, so you just wait somebody to say "it's getting very late, I should leave now". Maybe because nobody said that, nobody left. Why didn't they leave in the morning? Maybe they were afraid, they were afraid of whats out there, the fear of the unknown. The people outside the mansion are afraid going there as well. Are they afraid going there, because they don't know why can't they leave. Maybe they think there's a ghost or something. In the end, they get out. But when they go into this church, the same happens. Then we see a massacre in the streets, what did that mean. I don't know, I'm too tired to analyze. Good night.10/10

Raymond Koepsell Perhaps I was born too late to appreciate this film; perhaps I was born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. In 1962 (three years before I was born), this may well have been scintillating, cutting-edge film making. By 2012 standards, "The Exterminating Angel" holds up only as a period piece. It represents its era well much the same way George Melies' "A Trip to the Moon" represents its era. I selected the Melies film for comparison because it is widely regarded as a watershed achievement for 1902. I can think of no other reason why "The Exterminating Angel" should be heaped with such praise by modern audiences - because it shaped what followed it. That alone does not make it a great film.Other better and more enjoyable watershed films include "Lost Horizon," "Metropolis," "Citizen Kane," "2001," "Nosferatu," and "Casablanca." "The Exterminating Angel" is an unfinished thought, too conventional to be considered much of an experiment; it wants to be a thought-provoking message movie, but it doesn't have anything to say and the only thought it provoked for me was "how much longer until I begin to care about what's happening?" Is "The Exterminating Angel" a bad movie? No, but nor does it represent the best that cinema has to offer and deserve to populate so many the top 50 or top 100 lists.My review may very well be derided for being too narrow-minded, ethnocentric, and corrupted by CGI. Trying to learn about the history of film, I looked forward to "The Exterminating Angel" and was more than willing to view it in its own terms. Days after watching this film, however, I still can't shake my conclusion that, even this agonizingly overlong movie was trimmed by three-quarters, the storyline and resulting tele-play wouldn't even make a memorable Twilight Zone episode. Hoping to see a bit of film history, I could find little reason to care about the characters or their plight, its causes and resolution. The film seemed less like a movie than an exercise. In what I have no idea.

felixoteiza Reading these reviews I notice that people keep making the mistake of judging a film by the intentions of its creator. So, if Buñuel says that TEA doesn't have a meaning we got to believe him so. That's wrong. We have to understand that what distinguishes an artist from the rest of us is his/her capacity to bring to the open in a orderly, harmonic fashion what lies hidden in his/her--or in the collective--subconscious mind, many times without even being aware of its meaning. For that reason his/her opinion on the finished artwork is just as good as ours. Now, in what most of us agree is that there's a metaphor here somewhere; and knowing about Buñuel's rather poor opinion of the upper crust it's just too tempting to jump into the "useless-without-the-workers-loafers" wagon. But I find that just too easy; as that is something we would see anyway in any of his movies, even if the subject was an extraterrestrial invasion. The anti-bourgeoisie angle was something to be expected of him, which doesn't mean it has to be the central, or unique, topic of this film.What I think Buñuel's dealing with here, more than anything else, is mental traps; or rather mind prisons. Mental prisons in which people fall, for reasons that may have their origin in circumstances, traditions or in simple mindsets. Now, if you think I'm talking theory, let me mention this most famous ex.: Einstein was able to discover the Theory of Relativity mostly because of his faith in Mathematics, as he thought that everything in the physical world comes codified in numbers and so each one of its mysteries could be likely solved by putting numbers in it; i.e. by putting it into mathematical form--in equations & formulas. That seems logical and sensible. But then to his surprise, came the Quantum Mechanics revolution--which has given us computers, Internet, DVDs, etc--but which states that the physical world is much weirder than what he ever thought & that many things in it happen randomly, by mere probability. Einstein never accepted that--God doesn't play with die, was his famous reply. He never accepted the laws of physics that have given us much of what's part of our daily lives, including Ipods, Tweeters and cell phones. For him, his own image of the world was more important than all what was happening around him. He had fallen in a mental prison, just like the characters in TEA. These people have all come to believe they can't get out of that room simply because that idea has gotten stuck in their heads, is part now of their mental reality, which is confirmed to them every time one tries, unsuccessfully, to do so--or rather the room embodies the idea, mindset in question in the metaphor).I know this explanation won't satisfy those who look for the anti-bourgeoisie angle, but I think I can fill up that hole. These people have lost their freedom of movements because of the mental trap they have fallen into, I said. Now this can only be conceived if they are otherwise able to move freely--or the thing won't fly. And the leisure class is the only one that fills such a condition. They are the only people who may get out of bed, or not, next morning simply because they are not forced to earn a living. With any other social class--middle, lower--this plot wouldn't work. In that case people would have simply broken out of the room because if they are not at their desks, production lines, kitchens, early next morning they'll be disciplined or fired. So this plot is only possible with people who does have usually the freedom of doing whatever they wish next morning and the upper crust is the only one capable of doing that. Buñuel may have been all anti-elite you want but he was above an artist and for him was foremost to put the right characters into the right plot--not that he didn't enjoy throwing more than a few jabs to the gold laden in this one anyway.Besides that, most of what we see here is filling: bits of personal experiences, of dreams, of social meetings. For all I said, I don't think the house workers' flight means the loafers' dependence on them. Anyway, as a leftist, Buñuel preferred to paint workers in a more proactive way, I imagine, and in his world they deal with reality, with practical things, so at the time of the metaphors they must be out of the picture.Good cinematography; the B/W is perfect here for the mood and the atmosphere. I love how Buñuel can make his actors say the most unlikely, absurd, things without flinching. And see how self-conscious these slackers are, compared to the European bourgeois in Discreet Charm (far more relaxed & désinvolte) because of their perennial Third World complex, always striving not to bee seen as "Indians with bows & arrows" (that, Buñuel never got it: that his Mexican actors were doing a good job, but impersonating their own upper crust, not the European, as he wished).