The mise-en-scene is packed with colorful, often shocking images (blood and body wastes are recurring motifs) but orchestrated in a creative delirium.
The Holy Mountain(La montaña sagrada)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Mexico, United States · 1973
Rated R · 1h 54m
Director Alejandro Jodorowsky
Starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas, Zamira Saunders, Juan Ferrara
Genre Drama
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In this searing satirical drama, an alchemist assembles a group of people to represent the planets of the solar system, before putting his recruits through a series of mystical rites so they can ascend the Holy Mountain and displace the gods who live there. Caused a scandal at the 1973 Cannes Festival.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Bill White
So extreme in its sacrilege that it achieves a kind of sacredness, The Holy Mountain is a transcendental feast of the grotesque and the sublime.
The Holy Mountain is nothing if not exuberant while cartwheeling its way through the cosmos and back through the non sequitur-strewn plains and deserts, towns and cities, ridges and ranges of Mexico.
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
On the whole, enjoyable nonsense.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
More than three decades later, Jodorowsky’s vision of chaos has acquired a powerful aura of prophecy.
Witty, disgusting, eye-popping, and incomprehensible, The Holy Mountain is every bit as pop-philosophical as Jodorowsky's earlier work, but it also contains original visual ideas nearly every 30 seconds, from frogs in armor to crucifixes made out of painted bread.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
A plumply overripe fruit of the counterculture, dripping with the juices of spiritual rebellion, semi-comic posturing, consciousness-raising and all-around freakiness.
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When someone tells you a movie is weird, what do you normally think? Does it have a nonlinear narrative? Are the characters strange? Is the dialogue cryptic? Is it a film about a film? The Holy Mountain might not have been the first time that all of those characteristics found themselves in the same pit of bizarre cine-symbolism, but it is certainly among the most iconic. Nothing can possibly you prepare you for this labyrinth of the strange. Your adventure awaits.