Sightlines · reception
How The Exterminating Angel was received
1962 · Luis Buñuel · The Exterminating Angel on Sightlines
The arc
Baffled some at its 1962 Cannes premiere — Buñuel himself grumbled it needed a bigger budget and 'real luxury' to land properly — but it's since been fully canonized as one of the great surrealist films, a fixture of Buñuel top-fives and Criterion shelves.
What’s debated
The eternal fan debate is what it 'means' — Francoism? the Church? the bourgeoisie? — versus Buñuel's own insistence that there is no explanation and you shouldn't look for one.
Its footprint
Its premise is one of cinema's most referenced setups — the 'they simply cannot leave' scenario echoes through countless films and think-pieces — and it got a second cultural life as Thomas Adès's acclaimed 2016 opera and as one half of Stephen Sondheim's final musical, Here We Are.
Where it stands
A 'you must have seen this' pillar of the arthouse canon and a Letterboxd darling — often the gateway Buñuel, endlessly quoted in reviews as the ultimate dinner-party-from-hell film.
Did you know? Buñuel deliberately repeated shots and lines of dialogue throughout the film — around twenty repetitions by his own count — and later joked that if anyone found the film mysterious, so did he; he also admitted he wished he'd shot it in Paris or London, since his Mexican production couldn't afford convincingly luxurious props.