General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Turin Horse

The Turin Horse (A torinói ló) is a 2011 black-and-white art film directed by Béla Tarr, co-directed by Ágnes Hranitzky and co-written with the novelist László Krasznahorkai, which imagines what became of the horse whose whipping in Turin in 1889 reputedly triggered Friedrich Nietzsche's mental breakdown.¹ A Hungarian-German-French-Swiss co-production, it won the Jury Grand Prix (Silver Bear) and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival, and Tarr announced that it would be his final feature film.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	A torinói ló; black-and-white Hungarian-German-French-Swiss feature, 2011¹
Directors	Béla Tarr, co-director Ágnes Hranitzky; screenplay by Tarr and László Krasznahorkai¹
Key crew	Cinematography Fred Kelemen, music Mihály Víg, editing Ágnes Hranitzky⁴
Cast	János Derzsi (Ohlsdorfer, the carter), Erika Bók (his daughter), Mihály Kormos (Bernhard), with the horse Ricsi¹
Runtime	Listed as 149 minutes by the National Film Institute; other sources give 146 or 154–155 minutes¹^•²^•⁵
Awards	Silver Bear Jury Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize, Berlin 2011; Golden Camera 300 for Fred Kelemen at Manaki Brothers; Hungary's submission for the Academy Awards³^•²
Status	Tarr's declared final feature film²

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film follows six days in the life of a carter named Ohlsdorfer (János Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bók) on an abandoned farm in a windswept wilderness. Their routine is fixed: they get up, get dressed, drink pálinka, draw water, feed the livestock, eat boiled potatoes, and go to bed, while outside the wind blows ceaselessly.¹ The routine breaks when the horse falls sick: it refuses to move, and later will neither eat nor drink. The well's water vanishes, the stove's embers go cold, and by the sixth day the wind, too, has stopped blowing.¹ Odd travelers, driven by the raging wind, arrive at the door seeking sanctuary.⁵

The National Film Institute describes the film as a reversed story of creation and the closing act of Tarr's oeuvre, in which time goes on but does not pass and the protagonists do not act but vegetate.¹ In one emblematic sequence, the Ohlsdorfers pack everything onto the horse-drawn cart and set off beyond the horizon, only to reappear moments later and return to the spot they left from, accepting that there is nothing for them beyond the hill.¹

The Nietzsche anecdote

The film is framed by a story about the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. On January 3, 1889, in Turin, Italy, Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Alberto, sees a cab driver whipping a stubborn horse that refuses to move, and ends the scene by throwing his arms around the horse's neck, sobbing.² According to the prologue's account, he then lies motionless and silent for two days before uttering his last words, and lives another ten years silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters.² The prologue closes on the question the film takes up: of the horse, we know nothing.⁶

Tarr himself treated the horse as a real presence rather than a symbol. Asked whether the story was a parable, he answered, "No, it's not a parable. This is a horse who has history, who has background, who is definitely somebody," adding that the film's horse is female and that in Hungarian torinói with a small 't' simply means "from Turin."⁷

Origin of the project

The idea dates to 1985, when Krasznahorkai gave a reading in a Hungarian theater and closed with the text that became the film's prologue, ending on the question "What happened to the horse?" Tarr said he and his collaborators wondered how to do something with that question, since everyone listens to the Nietzsche story for Nietzsche's sake and nobody listens for the horse.⁷ The screenplay drew on Krasznahorkai's essay Latest in Turin and the key monologue from the narration Isiah Came.¹

Style

Long takes and repetition. Tarr's trademark long takes give the film its distinctive texture; the average shot length has been calculated at 229.2 seconds, against roughly 2 to 3 seconds for a contemporary action film.⁸ Screen time typically matches the duration of the actions shown, with the narration selective in showing and repeating certain events, so that quotidian activities appear in plain chronological order without explanatory framing.⁹ Scholars have read the long takes and recurring images as a reflection of the temporal structure of Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence.¹⁰

Sound and light. Repetitive music by Mihály Víg, the constant roar of the wind, and sparse dialogue create what one analysis calls a music-and-noise symphony that takes the place of dialogue in the film.¹¹ Lighting becomes a central effect only in the last minutes, when, according to the story, all light is gone: the scenes take place in near darkness, with just enough light to render the characters as light-gray shadows in gray darkness.¹¹

The production was as deliberate as the result: rehearsals for the first scene lasted nine months, and the actor János Derzsi called it the most difficult Tarr film.¹

Reception and place in Tarr's career

The film premiered in competition at Berlin in 2011, where it won the Jury Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI Prize; it was later Hungary's official submission for the Academy Awards.³^•² Critics received it as a summation of Tarr's career. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 87% critics score, with a critics consensus calling it "uncompromisingly bold and hauntingly beautiful"; Metacritic records a metascore of 80 based on 15 critic reviews.¹²^•¹³ Reviewers compared its father and daughter to figures from a Samuel Beckett play and described the film as a parable about duration and endurance rather than event and emotion.⁵^•¹²

Tarr had announced before the premiere that this would be his last film, telling an interviewer it was "definitely a closing movie because I collected everything."⁷ After its release he moved to Sarajevo, where he founded the film academy film.factory, and he continued working as a producer and teacher; he died at the age of 70.¹⁴ Because the director declared he would never make another film, the National Film Institute notes that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to evaluate The Turin Horse as a standalone work rather than as the endpoint of his oeuvre.¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026