Whatever one thinks of Carlos Reygadas, it’s hard to argue against his ability to open a movie. His newest film Heil Jupiter!, largely spoken in an imaginary language with some Spanish sequences mixed in, begins with slowly morphing shapes and colors over the course of the opening title cards. The aim of pure formal amorphousness continues all film long, but it’s most successful when we open on images of water: sequences of waves are morphed into new patterns by visual effects, and then we overhear snatches of a conversation from the perspective of the sea floor. Four youths (two boys and two girls, all clearly Indigenous) are frolicking on the beach and its rocks, and while the conversation and initial pairings suggest heterosexual couples, Reygadas quickly shifts to them having same-sex hookups on the rocks. As one of the boys spreads his cheeks, the camera seems to go inside and shifts to colonoscopy footage accompanied by psychedelic effects: Uncut Gems (2019) seems to have influenced American independent and Mexican arthouse films alike, but the visceral textures of the blood, sweat, and sand that Reygadas adds to the actual sex sequences are entirely his own.
Reygadas followed the world premiere of Heil Jupiter! by saying he wanted to leave as much of it as possible up to the audience’s interpretation, that he did not think images rooted in realism were up to depicting the current moment, and that he wanted to avoid having too much of a point of view, even if that was fundamentally impossible when making the film. On the one hand, who is this writer to deny him his aims when it’s so confidently executed? The film becomes unsummarizable almost immediately, but anyone who saw Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux (2012) might have a rough idea of what to expect in terms of shapeshifting inscrutability and the general look. It’s all individual set pieces that might cut to something else entirely with a single cut or eccentric dissolve. He’s gone even further out on a limb with Heil Jupiter!, right down to the imaginary language being entirely dubbed in post and the subtitles being decided upon after the fact — nobody making this film entirely understood what it was about until it was finished, and they still might not have the answers.
Nothing in this film is as beautiful as the high points of Post Tenebras Lux, but everything here is consistently madder. The director’s glass-like lensing that provides a sort of halo to the edges of the frame is back, along with his fondness for extreme close-ups and bizarre angles — perhaps the most memorable involves a pig giving birth to piglets that subsequently either nurse or struggle to live. The four characters at the start make some recurring appearances, most memorably in a fiery cult and peacefully painting in the mountains, but it’s never quite clear who they’re meant to be (are they even the same characters throughout?), and Reygadas just as easily shifts to entirely different worlds that don’t seem to have much to do with them. (Outside of the Uncut Gems colonoscopy, the only other film that comes to mind as a potential cinematic influence is the similar four-character-freakout structure of David Lynch’s 2006 Inland Empire.) We see human legs get chopped apart as if being prepared for a butcher’s market (curiously bloodless), someone’s face is transfigured into a donut shape, but they still deliver a monologue, and a pilot taking off briefly has a screaming woman on his windshield before she gets blown away like a bug. It certainly ranks as one of the most unpredictable narrative films ever made, if it even qualifies as one.
All of the above makes Heil Jupiter! seem like a black comedy of absurdism, and while there are a few elements of that, the film ultimately skews far more serious. Here’s where “on the other hand” comes in: it’s Reygadas’ deliberately murky political statement, with numerous sequences possessing clear fascist connotations and a clear preoccupation with both A.I. and contemporary persecutions, usually of Indigenous people. The title is a hint: a Nazi’s salute to a temperamental father-god figure that controls nearly everything in the universe. (Is Reygadas hailing himself?) The first and most memorable of the political trials is a clear contrast to the opening sequence’s watery lusts, with the water being a stagnant and muddy pond. It’s shot from the perspective of a policeman’s body cam (Reygadas cited police body cam videos as the most frightening movies being made today), which reveals a world whose absurdist, A.I.-motivated laws surrounding translation and final statements of suspects also turn into a riff on the Salem Witch Trials. If you sink and drown, then you’re innocent; if you float and live, then you’re guilty and will be drowned anyway. The modern (or post-modern) touch is that these trials involve a chair with the suspect tied to a bulldozer, which dunks itself into the water to submerge the suspect.
Much more troubling is a series of trial sequences that are both clearly meant to be about unjust persecution, and feature a clearly intellectually disabled performer serving as the just-as-clearly evil judge. (Is Reygadas implying fascists are functionally intellectually disabled?) Said trial sequences get the most unappealing lighting and filters in the movie, and don’t shy away from presenting all the participants as useless enablers — until the time comes for there to be a riot in the courtroom. What are the reasons for the riot? What’s the purpose of the trial? No answers here, but a late-film sequence that is clearly meant to evoke Auschwitz’s mass graves and cremation has similar uncomfortable connotations, particularly with the return of that dunking bulldozer filling a more conventional purpose. It only makes two appearances, but it’s perhaps the ultimate symbol of destruction disguised as progress.
Reygadas’ commitment to letting the viewer interpret events however they like is perhaps tricky to marry to such a free-floating morass of loaded symbols with clear political signifiers, but it warrants serious consideration for being such a committed reckoning with some of the weightiest existential questions of the current age — and for trying to find a new form for it. Much like our world, it’s frequently ugly and boring and hard to put up with, but the unpredictable beauty of it can keep you going if you roll with its punches. (From the perspective of seeing it at the 64th New York Film Festival, Heil Jupiter! made most of the experimental short films in Currents look even more stale and reiterative than several already clearly were.) It’s near-impossible to assess whether Reygadas crashed or soared with Heil Jupiter!, but that’s probably just the type of reaction he wants to provoke.
Published as part of NYFF 2026 — Dispatch 5.
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