NYFF Review: Carlos Reygadas’ Heil Jupiter! Breaks Into a New Realm of Creativity

Waves crash and spill over the rocky edge of the Earth in the protracted opening shot of Carlos Reygadas’s Heil Jupiter! With apocalyptically colorful skies and turbulent waters, the doomy sea-set scene looks like it’s taking place in the primordial soup era of the planet’s 4.6 billion-year lifespan. The mythically-sourced spherical shape that slowly apparates in the middle of the frame seems out of time entirely, a snowglobe bubble of inconceivable shapes and symbols seemingly sketched onto an invisible molecular realm by an unknown deity before time existed. But the two couples that eventually drift into frame are inescapably modern. 

In a blip, the aforementioned four disappear and two metallic, blood-red ovals pop onto the screen. One faces the camera, a portal waiting to be entered, while the other lies at its feet in submission, looking up toward the sky. We close in on the mysterious objects and cut to a sequence of blood, fish eggs, and bodily fluids pooling together amidst an orgy of extreme close-ups on the couples’ bodies in carnal action. It’s only a matter of time before one of the four bends over and the camera slowly enters their anus, proceeding to flow freely through the subject’s organs in raw biological footage that harkens back to De Humani Corporis Fabrica. 

The dichotomy of the opening sequence sets up the overarching polarity of the film’s subjects: the exploratory pair of couples and the dystopian surveillance state hunting them down. There’s no conventionally executed plot in Heil Jupiter!, so it’s a bit misleading to define the narrative any which way. But there’s a throughline: after a long-gestating partner-swapping scenario unfolds between the couples in the opening scene, we bounce back and forth between the activities of the fugitive four across time and space and the neuralinked, AI-controlled, occasionally faceless police officers that eventually bring them to a witch trial set in the future. 

The outline of a story sets up the bevy of dueling themes across the feature: the contemporary and primitive, mechanical and primal, technological and rural, corporeal and mythic; cosmic beauty and totalitarian control, intimate connection and state violence. To contrast all of these things without a traditional narrative, Heil Jupiter! wields a stream-of-consciousness logic and implements that logic with dreamy pacing and constant experimentation within the edit.

The winding, varied visual aesthetics and dense foundational thematics of Reygadas’s seventh (and most accomplished) feature are vast enough to capture the most unbridled imagination. Likewise, they’re unwieldy enough to push any casual, unsuspecting viewer toward a different fine art for the week. Images morph, marble, duplicate, and deform across the film’s epic two-and-a-half-hour runtime—birthing objects, having epileptic episodes, metamorphosing before our eyes. 

The two most common visual aesthetics couldn’t be more disparate. One lens—the default, homebase lens for everything non-authoritarian—is defined by its cracked corners, which creates a shockwave-esque ripple effect around the border of the frame, distorting every image it produces with a primeval avant-garde. Reygadas usually employs it with stillness, meditation, and a sense of wonder, as if we’re looking through the eye of Zeus (aka Jupiter) himself. The next-most-used lens is a super-wide, unpolished police bodycam that operates with the chaotic composure of a twelve-year-old playing Call of Duty. Needless to say, it stands in for the perspective of the authoritarian forces. 

The Mexican auteur’s first feature in eight years is heavily experimental by popular standards, but he doesn’t appreciate the term. He would argue that art is experimental by nature, the practice of trying new things with any creative medium. But it’s worth noting that Reygadas turns the esoteric and psychedelic up to eleven, and while many, like myself, will find the experience transcendent, if not one of the best films of the year, many others will find it challenging, if not grating.

Consider: a cop with skin where his eyes should be or a witness in court with a giant hole in his face where his eyes, nose, and mouth should be; crosshairs fading onto screen and staying there for several minutes, channeling the technological presence and operational intention of the powers that be; everyone speaking in an invented language; a painting that slowly evolves and discolors, a la the Breaking the Waves chapter cards; an ever-splitting split-screen zoom trial; a pig giving birth; a closeup on a vagina being fingered while the people watching scream, “Slut!” and “Whore!” to the women engaged.

The score touches on nearly every genre and style of music, Reygadas transporting us from the ocean to the clouds to the cosmos in picture and sound alike. In one of the most gorgeous shot experiments, a frosted glass window—with the state seal plastered triumphantly in the middle—bleeds out in all directions in a Digger-esque swirl of surf green, gold, pink, and cream as the camera slowly dollies away from it to reveal a wide, morphing mural of an image. In another seminal shot, white-hot heat vision takes over at a bird’s-eye angle as we witness capital violence in the form of the execution of an Indigenous woman who’s tied to a bulldozer and drowned in a muddy pond, people cheering all around.

With Heil Jupiter!, Reygadas has broken into a new realm of filmic being, a new sphere of creativity. It’s a sight to behold. You don’t want to miss it.

Heil Jupiter! premiered at the 64th New York Film Festival.