Critic Reviews

This quietly amazing film is conceived in terms of pure minimalist intimacy.

A masterpiece. Admittedly, callow viewers may have difficulty getting past the cumulously bewigged Jean-Pierre Léaud’s uncanny resemblance to Phil Spector, circa 2008.

The small but wonderfully rich details of the film invite us in: the trembling of a wrinkled cheek, the arch of an eyebrow, the flicker of a candle, and especially the superbly evocative sound design.

The Death of Louis XIV may be Serra’s clearest film in terms of formal patterns and his most mysterious in actual meaning. It depends on who you ask; to this writer, that’s a good thing.

It is the attention to detail and the refusal to compromise that allows Serra to create such a compelling, coherent vision.

[Mr. Léaud's] riveting, and a little alarming. As for Mr. Serra, while he often enjoys playing the foppish provocateur in his interviews, his film is sober, meticulous and entirely convincing in its depiction of period and mortality.

In The Death of Louis XIV, Léaud shows us stray glimmers of the droll conversationalist and irrepressible bon vivant the Sun King once must have been. But his performance is finally a magnificent stare into the abyss, a sustained contemplation of things we would rather not dwell upon but will ultimately have to face.

The painterly camerawork shows the sheer sophistication possible these days with digital technology. The only conventional note in a highly distinctive film touched with wry humour is the too-safe choice of a Mozart music cue.

Serra’s sad, stately, haunting addition to the slow-cinema genre doubles up as both an intimate study of the Sun King’s death and a requiem for Europe’s fading arthouse scene.

Catalan prankster Albert Serra's film ultimately emerges as a compact, improbably riveting viewing experience.