by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
New York Film Festival
Cast:
Flor De León, Morgan Krantz, Neli de la Rosa, Mónica Calle
Intro:
... full of provocative questions but not always equally convincing answers.
The opening of Carlos Reygadas’ Heil Jupiter! is disorienting from the outset. Abstract coloured shapes flicker across the screen, leaving us wondering whether we are still looking at production logos and opening credits or whether the film has already begun. It is an unusual invitation into a work that seems determined to unsettle conventional expectations. Eventually, the shapes give way to the roaring ocean and the bodies of four young people struggling in the water.
The film follows two young couples who spend time together on a remote coast, exploring their sexuality and engaging in group sex on the beach. Their physical intimacy is presented as an expression of freedom, a world in which desire exists beyond the restrictions imposed by society. But this apparent idyll soon gives way to a much darker reality. The characters find themselves caught in different manifestations of authoritarian control: surveillance, police violence, public humiliation and an absurd judicial system in which sexual pleasure can become grounds for prosecution. The film moves between parallel realities and different geographical settings, connecting the freedom of the body with the mechanisms designed to discipline it.
One of the more intriguing episodes is the courtroom sequence, in which Lina is accused of witchcraft and subjected to an absurd trial. The proceedings expose a society where private behaviour becomes public evidence and nobody is beyond surveillance.
The Polish episode is particularly disturbing. It is striking that Poland is one of the film’s co-production countries, while some of its most horrifying scenes take place there. A woman is tied to an excavator and lowered into the water as a crowd gathers to watch, cheering on the spectacle. The episode evokes the medieval practice of water trials used in the persecution of alleged witches. But its meaning extends beyond this historical reference. Reygadas places contemporary technologies of surveillance and policing alongside an archaic form of collective punishment, suggesting that authoritarianism does not depend on state institutions alone. It also thrives on the complicity of ordinary people, their willingness to turn another person’s suffering into public entertainment. The woman’s persecution is inseparable from the hostility directed at migrants and those perceived as outsiders. The crowd becomes an active participant in a system that decides whose body deserves protection and whose can be publicly humiliated or destroyed.
Even the title, Heil Jupiter!, seems to reinforce this tension. It combines the mythological image of a supreme deity with the disturbing associations of a totalitarian salute. Jupiter becomes a metaphor for an all-seeing presence before which individuals are expected to justify their existence. In a world increasingly governed by surveillance technologies, social conformity and demands for constant self-identification, the film asks whether we have also become our own guardians — monitoring, judging and policing one another.
These are interesting ideas, particularly coming from a filmmaker whose public reputation has been affected by allegations of sexual harassment made during Mexico’s #MeToo movement in 2019. The allegations were publicly raised by filmmakers Katina Medina Mora and Yupi Segura; they should not be confused with a judicial finding of guilt. Nevertheless, they inevitably complicate the reception of a film so preoccupied with sexual freedom, the boundaries of permissible pleasure and the right to judge other people’s behaviour. There is something uncomfortable about watching a director associated with such public controversy construct a world in which sexual expression is persecuted and moral condemnation becomes a tool of oppression.
Heil Jupiter! has not followed the route through the major international festival circuit traditionally associated with an established auteur. Its appearances at festivals such as New York Film Festival, Viennale and Film Festival Cologne suggest a more limited and differently structured circulation. It would be tempting to interpret this as evidence that Reygadas is no longer readily embraced by the festival establishment, especially in light of the controversies surrounding him. But there is no reliable basis for claiming that the allegations explain the film’s festival trajectory.
Ultimately, Reygadas offers a work full of provocative questions but not always equally convincing answers. His images can be hypnotic, disturbing and visually impressive, yet their accumulation often weakens rather than sharpens the film’s argument. The opposition between bodily freedom and authoritarian control is compelling, but the questions of sexual pleasure, consent, power and public judgement demand more than a succession of provocative tableaux.
