Music

Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex inspired this intentional and affecting drama.

In unfurling the story of a boy who becomes a killer, a lover, and a singer, the German director Angela Schanelec continues to move to her own inimitable beat.

It is a daring and assured subversion of conventional film language that will likely infuriate certain viewers and reward others.

Hope was never something that I associated with Schanelec’s typically dour films, yet here, from the darkness of a timeless tragedy emerges light.

Initially, more than mere fun, Angela Schanelec’s approach to storytelling is surprisingly affecting, but once you’ve figured out how to play, the game begins to feel a bit, well, ancient.

Some will find it rewarding and some won’t; I myself am unsure. But as an event and a spur to thought it is to be welcomed.

Angela Schanelec continues her exploration with loose adaptations of classic texts...Schanelec is an incredible director of bodies in space: she is so attentive to how characters move and are placed within the frame and with respect to each other.

A sudden event has far-reaching consequences in Music, this challenging, uneven, and downright confusing Oedipal tragedy.

A candidate for what is now called “slow cinema” or, more aptly, “poetic cinema,” “Music” is unique, at times puzzling, and memorable.

...Schanelec’s mostly dialogue free film is simply too nebulous to get a narrative grip on, instead a series of long, slow takes with very somber people where very little happens.