Rut (Rut Reygadas) is a little girl who has recently got the hang of walking, just about as she does fall over sometimes, but as she wanders this expansive field near her house she is less interested in gravity and more in the cows she sees ahead of her, running towards them with enchantment. Her father's pet dogs are there too, barking at the larger beasts and causing them to scatter, though just as Rut catches up with them she notices some distance away horses galloping across the other end of the field. But night is falling alarmingly fast, and a storm is brewing overhead as she is plunged into darkness and starts calling out for her family...
Whatever else you thought about Post Tenebras Lux, you had to admit that opening ten minutes featuring the director's toddler daughter were strangely compelling, partly thanks to its lack of explanation amounting to a cold opening, an enigmatic beginning where nothing much is explained, not where Rut's parents were nor where she was or even what she was doing there all alone aside from the dogs. To be fair, that set the viewer up for the rest of the movie as director Carlos Reygadas appeared to have thought up a set of loosely connected scenes, some surreal and others extreme, most of which featured recurring characters, and strung them all together.
If they did not make complete narrative sense, they would make imaginative sense seemed to be the excuse for baffling audiences as to what precisely was supposed to be going on, mixing the mundane with the melodrama or the fantasy with the sexual without much guidance as to how every scene tied with the next, or the previous for that matter. By taking the family of Rut, which was not the family of the director but two actors plating Nathalia the mother (Nathalia Acavedo) and Juan the father (Adolfo Jiménez Castro) then more confusingly her actual brother Eleazar as her screen brother, as the central thread, we saw them at various stages in life, from the time the children have become teenagers back to the point in the parents' life where they visited a Belgian club for swingers.
There can't be many of those in the movies, but there was one here in a sequence which might even have been an example of the dreams which intruded into the more prosaic parts, but then again might have explained why Juan was seeking help for his pornography addiction later in life, but earlier in the movie: if nothing else, concentrate on the film's grudge against the father figure for a running theme. Another talking point was the short stretches where a red devil arrives in a different family's home carrying a toolbox, is noticed by a sleepy yet surprised little boy, then disappears into his slumbering parents' room to do we know not what. Then there was the ultimate fate of one character, which was surely medically impossible, though given he was suffering crushing guilt (we assume) perhaps he was driven to such an incredible feat.
As if that were not problematic enough, we see the maligned Juan being insufferably abusive to a pet dog (staged, but uncomfortably convincing nonetheless) and out of nowhere a few encounters with an English schoolboy rugby match thousands of miles away from the action in Mexico. This was all very well, but Post Tenebras Lux was really a film where you needed to seek out the director and ask him a number of specific questions about what the hell was going on; unless you enjoyed the sensation of bemusement - which was entirely possible, that can be quite enjoyable - it was recommended you investigate the interviews Reygadas gave to explain himself, though even then he didn't come across as being clear on many of the finer points, preferring a more instinctive journey through his processes. As it stood, with its lovely nature photography and odd effect on the camera lens in many shots, if you could tolerate the more disturbing elements this could be a fairly enjoyable diversion through one man's impressions of family life with all its weirdness, contradictions, variety and yes, the darkness before the light.
