In UK cinemas from 7 December

For Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas, film is less a narrative tool than a medium through which to convey a particular experience of reality. In Silent Light, he shows how it might feel to be a Mennonite farmer, husband and father conducting an affair and seeking the transcendental. A visual and auditory concentration on the minutiæ of everyday life, unrelentingly slow pacing, and de-eroticised sex, are combined with vast landscapes and wonder at characters’ undiscoverable inner lives to portray life as it is experienced, the prosaic infused with the ineffable or sublime. While the technically miraculous long takes create tension, the plot does not, and with the lack of dialogue and ‘acting’ (Reygadas prefers to use nonprofessionals) the viewer is left not with a sense of having been on a dramatic or emotional journey, but rather with a vague, amorphous impression of the spiritual. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be a Mexican Mennonite – the more impatient viewer (Silent Light comes in at a very slow 136 minutes) might argue that, if so, despite the beauty of the landscape, their lives must be pretty dull. Or, given the shared themes between this and Reygadas’s last film, Battle in Heaven – repressed emotions, disconnection, the desire to feel – perhaps it is a more general view of what it is to be human. Showing, not telling, Silent Light is a thoughtful and at times awe-inspiring (particularly the virtuoso opening shot of night seeping into morning) use of film, well served by its subject.