The Exterminating Angel

A group of high-society friends are invited to a mansion for dinner and inexplicably find themselves unable to leave in Luis Buñuel’s daring masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador). Made just one year after his international sensation Viridiana, this film, full of eerie, comic absurdity, furthers Buñuel’s wicked takedown of the rituals and dependencies of the frivolous upper classes


Overview
Luis Bunuel's wicked, ambiguous tale of a bourgeois dinner party gone rather remarkably wrong has finally become available on DVD in North America in an excellent edition from the Criterion Collection. El Angel Exterminador (aka The Exterminating Angel) has been transferred to disc in its original full-frame aspect ratio of 1.33:1, with the image slightly window-boxed to make the full picture visible on all screens. The picture quality is just slightly below Criterion's usually high standards; while the image is clean of blemishes and as sharp as possible, the image in the early reels sometimes looks a bit streaky, which appears to be a fault in the processing of the source materials rather than any flaws in the transfer, though as the picture grows darker and moodier, Gabriel Figueroa's shadowy cinematography looks noticeably better. The audio has been mastered in Dolby Digital Mono, and sounds good, though a bit tinny, again a fault of the original recording rather than any flaws in Criterion's transfer. The dialogue is in Spanish, with optional English subtitles but no multiple language options. The feature and the film's original theatrical trailer appear on disc one of this set, while disc two features The Last Script: Remembering Luis Bunuel, a charming feature-length documentary in which Juan Bunuel, the director's son, visits a number of the cities where the great surrealist lived and worked, including Madrid, Toledo, Paris, Hollywood, New York and Mexico City, while talking to his friends and collaborators. One of the people who chats with Juan Bunuel in The Last Script is actress Silvia Pinal, who also sits for a short interview shot exclusively for this disc, while the disc also includes another interview with producer and director Arturo Ripstein, who was an observer on the set of The Exterminating Angel as a teenager. A beautifully designed booklet, featuring an essay by Marsha Kinder and excerpts from mid-Seventies interviews with Luis Bunuel, fills out a superb set that treats one of the crown jewels of Bunuel's Mexican period as the treasure it truly is.

All Movie Guide - Mark Deming
As a son of old money who later fell on hard times and embraced Marxism, Luis Buñuel had a well-earned contempt for the idle rich, and he rarely put it to better use than in El Angel Exterminador. While the opening titles, in which Buñuel coyly proclaims that the film has no literal meaning, seem a perverse challenge, one can watch the film at face value and practically hear the wicked old surrealist chuckling at the fate of his clueless upper-crust types, whose baffling inability to go home confounds all logic but their own. With the inexplicable going on all around them, their puzzlement may not be quite so difficult to understand -- What are the sheep and the bear doing there? What do the servants know that caused them all to leave? -- but the outside world seems to have fallen in line with the delusion: as family, friends, police, and casual onlookers keep watch over the mansion, no one has the courage to go inside. After all, these people have money and power, and if they think they can't come out, there must be some reason why. While the characters seem benignly absurd in the film's early stages, they seem at once dangerous, pathetic, and darkly hilarious as they devolve into animalistic barbarism. Buñuel did not have much use for pity, and he never expends a drop for his characters here. Packed with dark, offhand humor, casually bizarre images, twisted dream sequences (including one that seems to refer to Buñuel's alleged contributions to the B-horror opus The Beast With Five Fingers), and a simple but deceptively intelligent visual style, El Angel Extermindor is the sort of film that only Buñuel could have made; along with Los Olvidados, it's the finest of his Mexican films, and an ideal warm-up for the triumphs of his last period, especially Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, with which it would make a superb double bill.