El Angel exterminador (1962)
Directed by Luis Buñuel

Film Review

On his return to Mexico, Luis Buñuel followed his successful Viridiana (1961) with this brilliantly dark surreal black comedy, the last film he made in his adopted homeland.  El Ángel exterminador (a.k.a. The Exterminating Angel) combines the unsettling creepiness of Buñuel's first silent works - Un chien Andalou (1928) and L'Age d'or (1930) - with a potent cocktail of anti-bourgeois, anti-religion, anti-authority satire.  It may not have the subtlety and sophistication of the director's later work, but its unapologetic directness and in-your-face humour makes it his most accessible and irresistibly funny film.

The inability of the guests to leave their host's drawing room is an obvious metaphor for the bourgeois tendency to blindly emulate one's neighbour and a reluctance to be seen to break any rule of etiquette, however ludicrous.  Buñuel's view is that a member of the bourgeoisie would rather starve to death or degenerate into savagery than commit the tiniest social faux pas, such as being the first to walk through an open door.  The guests in the film are prisoners of their own making.  To an outsider, their behaviour is insanely irrational, yet they act as if they are living through a real catastrophe (like the train derailment which is mentioned by one of the guests).

 The fact that no one can enter the house to save the guests is baffling but could be another metaphor, implying that the bourgeoisie are quite simply beyond salvation; the Hell they inhabit is one of their own creation, and they are ultimately on their own.   Buñuel is perhaps too kind in allowing the guests to find a way out of their predicament; did he intend that, or did he feel obliged to make this concession to prevent the film from being sanctioned?  Buñuel himself admitted that the film could not be given an unambiguous interpretation.  Its apparent inconsistencies merely add to its appeal as a surreal masterpiece.

In a provocative coda at the end of the film, Buñuel uses the sheep metaphor yet again, in a scene which repeats the main story, but with parishioners trapped in a church; then a flock of sheep walk towards the church after fascist-like guards have driven the people away.   Buñuel saw religion and bourgeois primness as barriers to human progress, and he had no qualms about portraying the bourgeoisie and churchgoers as mindless sheep, blindly following each other to the abattoir.  El Ángel exterminador is perhaps the one film that best encapsulates the art and philosophy of the great surrealist master Luis Buñuel.

Film Synopsis

A Mexican aristocrat, Edmundo Nobile, invites a dozen guests to a dinner party at his lavish estate.  The guests are arriving just as the servants decide, mysteriously, to leave the house.  After the dinner, the guests and their hosts retire to the drawing room, to socialise and listen to some music recitals.  When the time comes for the guests to depart they seem strangely reluctant to do so.  Instead, they remove their outer garments and lie down to sleep.  The next day, they still cannot leave the drawing room.  It is as if some external force was preventing them from going.  They have an improvised breakfast and slowly the hours pass.  Gradually, the 'prisoners' lose their dignity in what turns into a struggle for survival.  They live off water from a burst water pipe, they eat sheep that was intended as a post-dinner amusement, and they take turns to use a cupboard as an improvised toilet.  For some of the guests, the ordeal proves too much: some become aggressive, some take to prayer, others commit suicide.  It seems there is no way out…