Close Your Eyes · reception & legacy
2023 · Víctor Erice
How Close Your Eyes has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It arrived at Cannes 2023 in the shadow of a snub — relegated to the Cannes Premiere sidebar rather than Competition, prompting Erice to skip the festival — and then critics promptly crowned it anyway, topping year-end lists and being hailed as a late-style masterpiece almost overnight.
What's debated
Cinephiles go back and forth on whether the deliberately flat, unhurried middle stretch of its nearly three hours is the whole point or a test of patience — and whether the ending lands as transcendence or withholding.
Its footprint
Its musing that miracles have been missing from the movies 'since Dreyer died' became instant cinephile shorthand, endlessly quoted in reviews and Letterboxd logs about what cinema can still do.
Where it stands
An instant entry in the late-masterworks canon — the 31-years-later return of the Spirit of the Beehive director that film Twitter and Letterboxd treated as an event, not just a release.