El Topo (1970)
★½ — El Topo (1970)
El Topo occupies a strange and singular corner of cinema history. Released in 1970 by Mexican production company Producciones Panicas, the film arrived at a moment when underground and countercultural cinema was finding unexpectedly large audiences, particularly in North America, where midnight screenings were becoming their own cultural institution. It was, by most accounts, one of the films that defined what we now mean by the term "cult movie", drawing packed late-night crowds in New York and earning the admiration of figures like John Lennon, whose advocacy reportedly helped secure its wider distribution. That kind of origin story tends to build a mythic reputation around a film long before most people actually sit down to watch it, which is a double-edged thing. For context on some of the other adventurous, challenging work coming out of Mexico during this era, it is worth reading the site's take on Simon of the Desert, another Mexican production that wrestles with religious imagery and human absurdity, and Violet Perfume: Nobody Hears You, a later example of Mexican cinema pushing into uncomfortable territory.
The film was written and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born, Paris-based polymath who had already made a name for himself in theatre, mime and the avant-garde before turning his attention to film. El Topo was only his second feature, and it carries all the unchecked ambition of a filmmaker who has been given little restriction and perhaps too much creative latitude. Jodorowsky himself takes the lead role, playing the black-clad gunfighter of the title (the name translates as "the mole" in Spanish), and his young son Brontis Jodorowsky, then just six years old, plays his child companion at the outset of the story. That casting decision alone gives the production a peculiar intimacy and a faint air of the uncomfortable that follows it throughout. The supporting cast includes Mara Lorenzio, David Silva, and Paula Romo, all working within a framework that owes something to the spaghetti western in its surface imagery, dusty landscapes, gun duels, and a lone figure crossing a brutal world, while using that framework as scaffolding for something considerably stranger and more allegorical. Whether what is built on that scaffolding holds together is, to put it mildly, a matter of considerable debate among those who have seen it.
Jodorowsky went on to become one of the more discussed figures in world cinema without ever quite breaking into the mainstream, and El Topo remains the film most associated with his name. It is the kind of work that critics tend to either treat with great reverence or approach with deep scepticism, and it rarely leaves anyone indifferent. If you are curious how its particular brand of surreal, physically confrontational storytelling compares to other challenging adventures from the same decade, the site's coverage of A River Called Titas makes for an interesting companion read, and for something altogether more commercially minded from the same period, there is always Futureworld.
A-Z World Movie Tour Mexico What the actual fuck was this? I thought I was getting something like Shogun Assassin at the beginning. A lone warrior, a child, some mythic badassery. Instead, I got an incoherent, self-important, grotesque mess masquerading as art. Apparently David Lynch and Nicholas Winding Refn are fans and I can see how. I really can't stand movies that gratuitously show rape and sexual violence and all this whacky random scenes, characters and plots. It's not "good" cinema. It's just an unenjoyable mess. Never once has the phrase "oh mate I've got a great film we can watch together" been uttered before this movie begins. This movie is full of nonsense. Religious symbolism with no payoff, endless scenes of amputees, dwarves, monks doing... something, and so much rape and violence it starts to feel like a fever dream from a guy who just threw a bunch of bad ideas at a wall to see what stuck. It's troublesome in every way. It's pretentious, exploitative, and utterly exhausting. I heard he's been trying to get funding for a sequel for 55 years. The only thing that didn’t make me want to claw my eyes out was the soundtrack. That’s it. One star for the music, half a star for the sheer audacity.
And honestly, I think that about covers it. The midnight movie reputation, the famous admirers, the decades of critical elevation, none of it changes what actually ends up on screen for two hours and five minutes. The soundtrack is genuinely good, I will give it that, and there is a certain grim fascination in watching something so committed to its own chaos. But commitment is not the same as coherence, and audacity is not the same as art. Some films earn their cult status through genuine strangeness that rewards patience. Others are simply a trial. I know which camp this one fell into for me. Sometimes the mole should have stayed underground.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 1970 | Watched: 2025-07-18
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for El Topo (1970) on YouTube
Where to watch
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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)
