Hard to Be a God

Hard to Be a God creates its own uncanny world: it is beautiful, brilliant and bizarre.

The late director Aleksei Guerman’s last film is a grandly arbitrary carnival of neo-medieval depravity. It’s also a mudpunk allegory of Russian barbarism and backwardness.

While there are implicit references to the horrors of the Soviet and post-Soviet state and to the 20th century in general, this monstrously overflowing film seems to aim even higher.

It is grotesque and deranged and Hieronymus Bosch-like, and damn if it isn’t a bona fide vision — but of what, exactly?

Textually, the setting's brutalist conflation between the far future and the distant past makes the film timeless, an elusive fable told with the viscous immediacy of a life on the diseased edge of civilization.

Hard to Be a God is a cinematic behemoth, an unshakable monochrome nightmare of squelching bodily discharges that inhabits a world so noxious you can almost smell the pungent deterioration of humanity as it spews forth from the screen.

In essence it’s an historical artifact created in a time capsule: impressive in its way, yet its retardataire mannerisms require more distance before judgment can be passed on whether it’s a major work engaged in earlier forms, or an intriguing footnote trapped in a spent modality.

Great movie! This needs to be screened in Salt Lake City. Videowest can help. People here would love it. When will this be available for wider release? What's the delay?

Fellini's moving camera where everything as if by chance happens in the close ups, but nothing wants to deliver much meaning - it is about dreams, or here, about nightmares: all deeply sunk in mud, blood and feces. We should consider ourselves lucky that it is all filmed in black & white. In 3 hours of unrelenting merry go round of theatrical disgust, the only fragments of a (supposedly relevant) plot are revealed in a voiceover.

I created an account just to review this movie. This movie had a great promise, it had super high ratings from the critics, and the premise was interesting and unique, I was looking forward to a scfi romp with deep philosophical discussions, what I got was, in a word, **** 30 minutes into watching this crap, I had to check the internet for another source because I thought maybe the subtitles were wrong, but then I realized that most of the dialog is random, nasty, and has no logical connection to any other dialog or to the "plot". Besides the introduction at the start and some other times, there would be no way to know what is going on. But it seems like critics loved this film because of a) It was by a famous Russian director b) Its black and white so it seems more artistics and c) It does make you feel something, makes u feel disgusted and bored, I think they think that making you feel these things is an achivement, its not, watching a cat **** for 3 hours could have the same effect. Don't watch this film, its nonsense, disgusting, extremely dumb, there is no "sc-fi" elements and its boring crap.

One of those overtly grotesque eastern European films that thinks tossing the viewer into a cesspool of muck and mire will result in a genuinely disturbing emotional experience when, in fact, all it does is highlight pretentious direction, garish set and costume design, and low production values. Ostensibly having horror as it's center attraction, this cheap hyper-"realism" only results in a queasy and phony viewing experience, like a faked rabbit-fur oddity in a carnival-freakshow glass jar. Unpleasant, tedious, and pointless.

By far the worst movie i have seen this year. You can talk about very well-done camera work or the movie being a true art. But constant close-ups don't look so impressive when they occupy 99 percent of the film and no matter how many angles you show faeces from, they will stay faeces and will stink the same. I don't understand that kind of art. There are hundreds of AMAZING movies that trigger disgust on purpose but in such a way that a viewer gets engaged with the events of the picture, but "Hard to be a god" simply disgusts by itself