Begotten

"One of the ten most important films of modern times."-Susan Sontag

Nobody will get through Begotten without being marked.In this nightmare classic by Edmund Elias Merhige, a godlike thing dies giving birth to a quivering messiah thing; then the local villager things ravage and bury them, and the earth renews itself on their corpses.It is as if a druidical cult had re-enacted, for real, three Bible stories -- creation, the Nativity and Jesus' torture and death on Golgotha -- and some demented genius were there to film it.No names, no dialogue, no compromises, no exit.No apologies either, for Begotten is a spectacular one-of-a-kind (you wouldn't want there to be two), filmed in speckled chiaroscuro so that each image is a seductive mystery, a Rorschach test for the adventurous eye.-Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine