Credits: screenplay: Veiko Őunpuu; director of photography: Mart Taniel; editor: Thomas Lagerman; music: Ülo Krigul; sound: Janne Laine; costume design: Helen Ehandi; producer: Katrin Kissa; production: Homeless Bob Production, Bronson Club, Atmo;

Country: Estonia, Finland, Sweden

Year: 2009

Running time: 110

Colour: Black & White

Format: 35 mm

Ounpuu’s painfully seductive THE TEMPTATION OF ST. TONY has an aesthetic and moral gravitas that many cinephiles feel has died out with the Bergmans, the Dreyers, the Fellinis. The movie may nod to these veterans and other cultural icons (Blake, Bosch), but be clear: This has Ounpuu’s stamp throughout. Shot in delicious black and white, a decision Ounpuu says he owes to the influence of Bela Tarr, and with an otherworldly soundscape and soundtrack, this film is more of an event than merely a single work. It tracks the dissolution of the body and soul of an Everyman - a bourgeois mid-level manager who searches for “good” - scrunched in between the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the profane. I don’t mean to sound uncool, but metaphysics can rock. Howard Feinstein