El Topo, dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mexico 1970, 125 min., Spanish with English subtitles, 18
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s allegorical cult Western screens in a new 4K restoration.
Directed, scored by, and starring the Mexican director, El Topo unfolds in a phantasmagoric desert landscape populated by a cast of vicious gunslingers. Chief among them is the film’s title character, ‘the mole’, who journeys across this surreal dreamscape with his young son to duel with four sharp-shooting Zen masters. In the film’s second half, El Topo becomes the guru of a subterranean tribe of outcasts who he must liberate from depraved cultists in a neighbouring town.
no. 236848.