Those who love Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light and those who hate it tend to use the same kind of lazy shorthand to describe its pleasures (or tortures). The story of Johan, a devout husband and family man who struggles–spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically–against his feelings for another woman, Silent Light’s languid, desperately sad narrative takes a turn towards the transcendent about a hundred minutes in, at which point I scrawled in my notebook, “Bresson in Technicolor, maybe on acid.” In my mind, this was high praise. But later in the day, I overheard another critic use a similar analogy to explain why Silent Light is, actually, “terrible”: “It’s like Diane Arbus doing Bergman, on quaaludes.” Maybe it’s just a generational thing–I’m a little too young to know much about ‘ludes–but that sounds even more appealing than what I initially came up with. Still, from here on out, I resolve to resist the dismissively simple equation of (Dead European Master + Passe Party Drug). Silent Light deserves better than that.

This was one NYFF selection that screened for the press sans a post-screening Q & A with the filmmaker, and I think it would have benefited tremendously from one. At the very least, there would have been quite a bit of value in talking to Reygadas about his process (armed with French and Dutch financing, the Mexican filmmaker shot on location in Northern Mexico’s Mennonite community, with a cast full of non-actors speaking their native tongue, the medieval German dialect Plautdietsch).

But admittedly, Reygadas would have been walking in to a tough crowd. Many critics seemingly wrote the director off after his last film, Battle in Heaven, which, in addition to sharing Silent’s ponderous pace, featured a now-infamous scene described by Gerald Peary as featuring an “unhappy, mechanical blow job ministered by a hot senorita on her numb, big-bellied chaffeur.” Peary, one of the film’s staunchest defenders, acknowledged that Heaven “grossed out many American critics” at that film’s Cannes premiere. I imagine that at least some of those who didn’t skip the NYFF screening of Silent Light in avoidance of further revulsion left disappointed when there wasn’t any.

Though much ink has been spilled on Silent Light’s magnificent opening and closing shots, it’s hard to isolate one image in this film as being more powerful than the last. One after another, Reygadas’ long, slow ultra-wide shots, occasionally sprinkled with psychedelic lens flares, took my breath away. It’s more like watching grass grow than paint dry, but either way, it’s undoubtedly a film that rewards a certain viewing temperament. But If Reygadas seems to take a while to get from cut to cut, it’s not because he’s wasting time: he fills the spaces created by his characters’ silences (awkward, intimate) with thunderous diegetic sounds, which themselves become catalysts for furthering the story. In an early scene, Johan’s family silently prays to the dull thump of a ticking clock. When his wife takes the children out for the day, Johan, left alone at the kitchen table with his guilt and sadness, stands on a chair and stops the clock. In the relative silence, he bursts into tears.

Silent Light, like Au Hasard Balthazar or even Teorema, tracks the movement of a divine force in unexpected form, but the film’s spirituality is provocatively murky. Johan is sure his passion for his mistress is either a test from God or an affliction from the devil, but he still speaks and behaves as though he himself is to blame for his sin. He seems to enjoy the slow torture of a life stuck between religious/moral duty and the imperatives of desire, in which any choice one way or another can be both guiltily wallowed in, and written off as the work of a higher power. Faith is, alternately, a bless, a curse, and an excuse.

But then there’s a fascinating scene in the film’s first hour, in which Johan’s father (the pair are played by a real father and son, Peter and Cornelio Wall) confesses that years before, he too felt passion for a woman other than Johan’s mother. With an almost disturbingly tight smile, the father says he envies his son, and a cut to Johan’s mother provides the punch-line: if he had to do it again, Dad would have chosen differently. But later, after a tragedy but before a miracle, the father soothes Johan by reminding him that his every action is preordained. The father’s earlier lament is transformed: it’s not that Dad envies his son’s ability to make the choice that he didn’t, but that he longs for the brief moment in life when such emotional traumas fell out of the sky, when God had him in his sights and he basked, unwittingly, in the light of divine attention.

Silent Light is a dramatization of that attention, which isn’t necessarily bound to a literal deity. In life and in the film, it often seems intangible and invisible up to the moment of the miracle.