At Eternity's Gate
Directed by Julian Schnabel
- drama
- history
The story
Famed but tormented artist Vincent van Gogh spends his final years in Arles, France, painting masterworks of the natural world that surrounds him.
What it’s like
Handheld camera hugs Willem Dafoe's face in close, jittery frames, then pulls back to wide, sun-bleached Provençal fields where the light is so hard and yellow it seems to hum. Julian Schnabel shoots much of it through distorted lenses and fractured angles, so the world wobbles the way a troubled mind might perceive it, with wheat, cypress and sky rendered in the saturated colours of the painter's own palette. The sound design leans on wind, insects and the scrape of brushes, broken now and then by a lone piano or a string drone that swells and falls away. The vibe is restless, aching and sun-scorched, with long unsettled stretches of silence, and it suits a quiet afternoon when you want art-world melancholy rather than comfort. Pacing is slow and drifting, moving in fragments between Arles, the asylum and the countryside, and its emotional arc follows an isolated man and his fragile bond with a loyal brother who keeps faith with him. Violence is absent, but intensity runs high through mental breakdown, self-harm and a few sharp, distressing outbursts. For people drawn to painterly, unsettling character studies who can handle melancholy and emotional strain.
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