CINEOS Premiere

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

A conquistador seizes command of a doomed jungle expedition chasing a city of gold that does not exist — and drifts into pure, ranting madness on a raft of the dead.

Herzog films real jungle, real water, real exhaustion, and lets the journey blur into hallucination until you can't separate the fever from the fact. The deaths are undramatic, the ending circular rather than final, and the score creates an uneasy transcendence instead of tension — so you are left holding what the film never processes for you. It does not lift when the credits roll: the last image of a man alone on a raft of corpses, the jungle utterly indifferent, simply stays.