BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

The film opens with a shadow. A man runs across a desert landscape, his silhouette stretching and shrinking against the sand, until he suddenly leaps and takes flight, soaring briefly before plummeting back to earth. It’s a sequence that tells you exactly what kind of ride Alejandro González Iñárritu is taking you on. If you’re looking for a linear plot about a guy winning an award, you’ve wandered into the wrong theater—or, more accurately, clicked the wrong thumbnail.

I watched this while my cat was systematically trying to knock a ceramic lamp off my side table, and honestly, the chaotic energy in my living room matched the screen perfectly. BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is a loud, expensive, and deeply weird shout into the void. It’s a film that arrived with the weight of an "event" but evaporated from the cultural conversation almost the moment the Netflix "play" button cooled down.

The Man in the Mirror

At the center of this surrealist whirlwind is Silverio Gama, played with incredible weariness and grace by Daniel Giménez Cacho (who you might recognize from Lucrecia Martel’s Zama). Silverio is a Mexican journalist and documentarian living in Los Angeles who is about to receive a massive international prize. This impending honor triggers an existential tailspin, sending him back to Mexico City for a series of encounters that blur the line between memory, dream, and history.

Daniel Giménez Cacho is doing the heavy lifting here. He has this way of looking at the world—wide-eyed but exhausted—that makes the film’s most bizarre moments feel grounded. Whether he’s having a conversation with his long-dead father in a bathroom or standing on a literal pile of bodies representing Mexico’s colonial past, he remains our emotional anchor. Griselda Siciliani, playing his wife Lucía, provides the necessary friction, reminding him (and us) that his internal crisis has external consequences for his family.

A Beautiful, Bloated Fever Dream

Let’s talk about the look of this thing. Darius Khondji, the cinematographer behind the gritty shadows of Se7en and the neon anxiety of Uncut Gems, shoots this on 65mm with wide-angle lenses that make every room look like it’s being stretched by a centrifugal force. It is undeniably gorgeous. There’s a scene in a dance hall—set to a localized version of David Bowie’s "Let’s Dance"—that is a technical marvel. The camera weaves through the crowd like a ghost, capturing the sweat, the rhythm, and the crushing loneliness of being a "success" in a room full of people who think you’ve sold out.

However, here’s the rub: Iñárritu doesn't just want to show you a dream; he wants to trap you in it for nearly three hours. After his back-to-back Oscar wins for Birdman and The Revenant, it feels like Netflix handed him a blank check and he decided to write a three-hour therapy session we weren't invited to. It’s indulgent in a way that only a director at the absolute peak of their power can be. Every metaphor is highlighted in neon; every historical grievance is shouted through a megaphone.

Why Did This Vanish?

It’s fascinating to look at BARDO within our current streaming-dominated landscape. In an era where "content" is often designed to be background noise, this is a film that demands your full, undivided attention and then actively tries to annoy you with its pretension. When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, the reception was so divisive that Alejandro González Iñárritu reportedly went back into the editing room and cut about 22 minutes before its wide release.

Despite that trim, the film still feels like a massive, ornate ship that can’t quite find a port. It’s an "auteur" film that was released during the tail end of the pandemic-era streaming boom, caught between the prestige of a limited theatrical run and the cold reality of a Netflix algorithm that would rather suggest you watch another season of Emily in Paris. It lacks the cozy nostalgia of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, opting instead for a confrontational, hall-of-mirrors approach to Mexican identity.

There are some genuinely cool details tucked into the production. For instance, the film is deeply self-referential; Silverio is essentially a stand-in for Iñárritu himself. There’s even a scene where a critic tears into Silverio’s latest film, calling it "pretentious" and "unnecessarily long"—it’s a pre-emptive strike against the very reviews the director knew he was going to get. It’s meta-commentary as a defense mechanism, and while it's clever, it also feels a bit like a "you can't fire me, I quit" move.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of BARDO depends on your tolerance for a director checking his own pulse for 159 minutes. I found myself oscillating between "this is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all year" and "please, for the love of cinema, get to the point." It’s a film that belongs to the contemporary era of "ego-epics"—movies where the craft is undeniable but the perspective is so insular it's hard to find a way in. If you’re in the mood for a visual feast and don’t mind a side of heavy-handed symbolism, it’s worth the trek. Just don't expect it to stay with you as long as the runtime suggests.