The Exterminating Angel

Name: The Exterminating Angel
Genre: Surrealist satire
Released: 1962

年份: 1962 (以英语打开)
导演: Luis Buñuel (以英语打开)
片长: 尚未确定

After an elegant dinner, a group of wealthy guests discover that none of them can bring themselves to leave the room.

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制片国家: Mexico (以英语打开)
语言: Spanish

Strange Funny Bleak 容易入门 · 适合耐心观看 Surrealist satire

编辑：Monocurator

Original illustration for The Exterminating Angel: An extravagant dining room viewed through an enormous completely open doorway: empty table setting, chandelier, rugs and doors that loop into further doors, all precise overlapping paper planes.

Image: Monocurator · source · Original Monocurator artwork

The Exterminating Angel: reading the ending

Follow the sequence of the final scenes, then consider what their repetition might mean.

Follow the final scenes and their repetition · Ending spoilers

What happens in the scenes

Leticia, one of the guests, believes the group has returned to the arrangement of an earlier moment in the drawing room. She asks the others to repeat what they said and did that first night. After this reenactment, they can leave the room and the house.

Her recognition is the character’s claim. In her Criterion essay, Marsha Kinder points out that some guests have died, complicating any literal return to the original gathering. The repetition brings a way out without establishing a dependable rule for how the confinement works.

The apparent release is followed by a church service. At its close, members of the congregation and clergy find that they cannot leave. Michael Joshua Rowin’s MUBI account traces this renewed confinement; the story has moved beyond the private dinner party.

One reading of the ending

The move from drawing room to church widens the satire: a public institution associated with order becomes another place of collective paralysis. On this reading, leaving the first room has not freed the wider society from the pattern. Alex Cox’s Criterion essay likewise treats the ending as a return of the problem. This is an interpretation of the recurrence; the film supplies no final mechanical, theological or psychological explanation for it.

你将看到什么

Buñuel refuses to explain the invisible barrier, making social ritual itself feel like the trap. Courtesy, status, religion, and appetite lose their civilised surfaces while the doorway remains physically open.

如何轻松入门

Do not search for a mechanical cause. Watch repeated actions and social roles; the film treats repetition as evidence that the group is imprisoned by more than architecture.

观影提醒

简要提示，并非详尽清单 Includes death, suicide, animal slaughter, starvation, illness, class cruelty, and religious satire.

Momo's Note 可能含剧透 Momo是谁？ → (以英语打开)

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I enjoy how quickly an impeccable room becomes a complete social system. Nobody needs to lock the door when everyone has learned the same rules about who may move first.

— Momo