The mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown time in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus completed with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens that builds inexorably toward violence. In thirty-nine hypnotic long takes engraved in ghostly black and white, auteur Bľa Tarr and codirector-editor ℓgnes Hranitzky conjure an apocalyptic vision of dreamlike dread and fathomless beauty.