Horse Money review: a Horse with no narrative

So you made it all the way through Hard to Be a God without flinching. Well done, you. You're arthouse hard. But that's not necessarily going to be enough to get you through Pedro Costa's first narrative film in nine years.

We say narrative. We don't mean it literally. We don't mean it at all. Instead, Horse Money comprises random meditations about Portugal's colonial casualties. Slowly, ponderously, as the film's protagonist, Ventura (Tito Furtado), wanders through gothic underpasses, hospital corridors and derelict buildings (replete with that arthouse standard, a disconnected telephone) the viewer pieces together various scenarios and might-have-beens.

Ventura may or may not have left his wife back in Africa in a shack with farm animals that may or may not have subsequently died. He may or may not be owed a paycheque from the construction company where he worked 20 years previously, and where he may or may not have fought against fascists.

Stubbornly, this information, like the film itself, refuses to coalesce into a palatable cinematic form. Costa presumably wishes to recreate the discombobulating and fractured psychogeography of the postcolonial condition. In this respect, Horse Money is certainly weighted with ideas and Borgesian impulses. As with Ventura, the viewer is robbed of all sense of time and place. Is this now or the 1970s? Should we be wearing a ruffled shirt?

However, save one odd musical montage and the striking sequence of archive photographs that opens the film, there is no trace of entertainment or spectacle, no sugar-coating, no pandering.

Interestingly, Horse Money tied with Leviathan in last year's Sight & Sound poll. As philosophical and challenging as the Andrey Zyyagintsev film was, it feels like The Avengers: Age of Ultron compared to this one.

Still, come and have a go if you think you’re arthouse hard enough.