The Exterminating Angel · reception & legacy

1962 · Luis Buñuel

How The Exterminating Angel has been received, argued over, and remembered.

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 canonised 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.