"We began in a fairytale and we came back to life, but is this life reality?"

A cornucopia of sacrilegious sights and sounds, every image so rich with symbolism and every passage packed with religious and social/historical allegory that one viewing simply does not suffice; to say that The Holy Mountain is unlike anything I've ever seen before would be a massive understatement. The film thrives and entirely relies on it's imagery, as the end result is something like a rorschach test - I can guarantee you that no one has one concrete answer for what exactly it all means. I find that absolutely beautiful.

To me (at least on initial viewing) the film stands as a rejection of religion and materialism - or rather, the dangers of letting them consume you. So much of the film seems entirely concerned with lies and manipulation, and the ties that it has to the power-obsessive nature of the Catholic Church.

I will not pretend to know exactly what all of these images mean, but I can promise that they will never leave me. What a breathtaking, transcendent work of art.