Why Slow Cinema Might Be Exactly What You Need Right Now

Slow cinema is exactly what it sounds like: films that move at a deliberate, unhurried pace, often featuring long takes, minimal dialogue, and extended shots of landscapes. Directors like Chantal Akerman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Tsai Ming-liang are the genre's pillars. It sounds boring. It's actually one of the most rewarding film experiences available.

The appeal is neurological as much as aesthetic. Your brain, conditioned by rapid-fire editing and constant stimulation, initially resists slow cinema. But around the 20-minute mark, something shifts. Your attention relaxes into a different mode. You start noticing details and rhythms that faster films never allow you to perceive.

Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker is the essential gateway. A guide leads two men through a mysterious forbidden zone toward a room that grants wishes. The pace is glacial. The images are unforgettable. The film asks questions about desire, faith, and meaning that stay with you for years.

Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is the other one to know. It runs 201 minutes and most of that is a widow in Brussels doing housework in real time: peeling potatoes, making coffee, running a bath. In 2022 it topped Sight and Sound's once-a-decade critics' poll, the first film directed by a woman to take the top spot. Watch it and you understand why the ending lands the way it does. Nothing in the last ten minutes works without the three hours of routine in front of it.

Contemporary slow cinema is thriving. Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car won the Oscar for Best International Feature and runs three hours of mostly people talking in cars. Celine Song's Past Lives takes two decades to tell a simple love story and makes every minute feel essential.

Practically speaking, slow cinema requires preparation. Turn off your phone. Don't watch on a laptop while doing something else. Give the film the same conditions you'd give a meditation session: quiet, focused, uninterrupted. The whole point is sustained attention.

Where you watch matters as much as what you watch. Criterion Channel runs about $11 a month and keeps a standing slow cinema collection; MUBI rotates a curated handful for roughly the same money. Use a television, not a phone. Turn subtitles on before the film starts so your eye stops hunting for them. And build in a break: Bela Tarr's Satantango is 439 minutes and was shown with intermissions from the beginning, which is the Hungarian intention rather than a concession to weak attention.

Think of slow cinema as a palate cleanser for your overstimulated brain. After weeks of doom-scrolling and binge-watching, sitting with a film that moves at the pace of actual human experience isn't boring. It's restorative. The boredom you're afraid of is actually your mind remembering what it feels like to be still.

The usual mistake is starting at the extreme end. People hear about Satantango, block out a Saturday, quit at hour three and decide the whole thing is a con. Start at 100 minutes instead. Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There? or Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which took the Palme d'Or in 2010, both do the job in under two hours.

https://www.criterionchannel.com/slow-cinema