El Topo (1970)

What the actual fuck was that? I mean it. I sat down for what looked, for all of five minutes, like a genuinely compelling piece of work. A lone gunfighter crossing a desert with a child in tow, some mythic, dusty atmosphere that had me thinking I was in for something in the spirit of Simon of the Desert, strange and spare but purposeful. Then the whole thing fell off a cliff it had apparently been sprinting towards, and I spent the next however-many hours wishing I could claw my way back to that opening ten minutes and stay there.

El Topo is the kind of film that dresses itself up in religious symbolism and surrealist imagery and expects you to mistake that wardrobe for a personality. It hasn't got one. What it's got is an endless parade of amputees, dwarves, monks doing God knows what, rape staged with what can only be described as relish, and random scene after random scene that connects to nothing and goes nowhere. I kept waiting for the payoff. It never comes. Because there isn't one. The whole thing is a fever dream from a filmmaker who seemingly threw every provocative, disturbing, "transgressive" idea he'd ever had at the wall and called the result profound.

I genuinely can't stand films that use sexual violence as wallpaper. Not as drama, not as consequence, not as anything that asks something of you emotionally. Just as texture. As part of the aesthetic. It's not daring, it's not challenging in any meaningful sense, it's just unpleasant. And El Topo leans into it repeatedly, wrapped in the defence that it's all symbolic, it's all allegorical, it's all art. No. Gratuitous is gratuitous regardless of how many monks you put in the background.

I've heard that David Lynch and Nicholas Winding Refn are admirers, and honestly, yes, I can see the lineage. There's a shared sensibility around image over coherence, provocation over narrative, the feeling that meaning is being generated somewhere just offscreen where you can't quite reach it. I have more patience for that approach in some contexts than others. Here, I had none. The difference between surrealism that works and surrealism that doesn't is whether you feel the filmmaker is in control of the chaos or just hiding behind it. This felt like the latter from about the twenty-minute mark onwards.

The one thing I'll genuinely credit is the soundtrack. It's strange, it's textured, it's genuinely interesting, and it's the only element of the film that felt like it had something real to say. One star for that. The extra half star is for sheer audacity, because whatever else this is, it's committed. Wrongheadedly, exhaustingly, infuriatingly committed.

Apparently the director has spent the better part of 55 years trying to get a sequel funded. I'll be honest with you: I don't know whether to find that tragic or hilarious. Probably both. What I do know is that no force on this earth is getting me to watch it. El Topo is pretentious, exploitative, and utterly exhausting, a film that confuses being unwatchable with being important. It is not a great film you put on with a mate over a pint. It is not, frankly, a great film at all.

One and a half stars. The music earns one of them.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 1970  | Watched: 2025-07-18

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Mexico: Nightmare City (1980) · Violet Perfume: Nobody Hears You (2001) · Simon of the Desert (1965) · Babel (2006)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)