The film opens with the screen filled with color, which changes to another, and then proceeds to change yet again multiple times in the span of several minutes. It then gives way to an image of the ocean, the waves crashing down repeatedly.
The first human presence only appears on screen several minutes later, as we are introduced to two couples hanging out on a beach, exploring romantic entanglements and each other’s bodies as the world around them watches, waiting to interfere.
This is as close to having a narrative or characters as Heil Jupiter!, the latest feature of Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas, ever gets in its 150-minute runtime. Since his first feature, Japón, came out in 2002 (and won a Caméra d'Òr - Special Mention in Cannes), Reygadas has established himself as a distinctive voice in arthouse cinema.
Still, his new film proves to be even more aesthetically radical and uncompromising than even his loyal viewers might be preparing themselves for. Venturing well into experimental cinema territory, Heil Jupiter! is proof that Reygadas views films (and what they can do) as a vastly different medium than how we tend to think about it.
While most of the director’s previous works, such as Battle in Heaven, Silent Light, and Post Tenebras Lux, focused more on the spiritual paths that humans’ minds and souls take, Heil Jupiter! strives to deliver commentary on the state of the outer world. The individual passions here are suppressed by the society where reality and myths, modern technology and traditional rituals clash in a bloody battle. At times, Reygadas’s new film evokes memories of Godfrey Reggio’s philosophical Qatsi films, visual poems exploring the interference of impending civilization, especially technology, with nature and spirituality.
But for all the experimental form of Koyaanisqatsi and its successors, Reggio still worked with rhymes and rhythms in them, while Reygadas here chooses to forgo those altogether. Lots of things happen in Heil Jupiter! that are pleasantly or uncomfortably unexpected; yet for all of its daring ambition, it gets increasingly hard to really care about any of it. Ironically, despite the fact that at one point we literally get a chance to glimpse inside the cosmic universe inside one of the characters, and the camera tends to get intimately acquainted with their bodies on numerous occasions, we don’t really get to know any of them.
As much as Reygadas understandably claims in his interviews to find the very idea of characters in films reductive, the same effect could be applied to having walking concepts and symbols moving on the screen. There is a notion in film theory that auteur cinema, more often than not, is primarily a conversation that the authors have with themselves, not so much with the audience.
Heil Jupiter! is a film that goes out of its way to exclude its viewers from the conversation so much that one can't help but question whether it's worth it to be present for it at all.
The film screens two more times at the 2026 New York Film Festival.