The New Yorker:

In unfurling the story of a boy who becomes a killer, a lover, and a singer, the German director Angela Schanelec continues to move to her own inimitable beat.

By Justin Chang

In the opening moments of “Music,” the tenth feature film from the German writer and director Angela Schanelec, thunder claps, wind whistles, and a heavy fog rolls across a mountainous landscape, somewhere in Greece. Under cover of darkness, a man (Theodore Vrachas), heaving and sobbing, struggles to carry a woman, who’s bleeding and unconscious; he gives up, sets her down, and clambers away on his own. The next morning brings an ambulance, a silent Greek chorus of frowning male faces, and a startling discovery: a baby boy, a weepy bundle of non-joy, is found, and rescued, on a nearby farm. Around the same time, a goat casually pokes its snout into the frame, as though anxious to know what the hell is going on. You will share its curiosity, and perhaps some of its incomprehension.

Have we stumbled upon a modern-day nativity scene? In a sense, yes, although Schanelec has excavated her tale from the ruins of an older, pre-Christian storytelling tradition; the goat, with its satyr-like associations, is as much a sign as it is a supporting character. Watch “Music” closely—and there’s truly no point in watching it any other way—and you will discover the sturdy bones of the tragedy of Oedipus, bent and twisted, almost beyond recognition, into a modern-day retelling. (Rest assured that I have revealed less than nothing, and that Schanelec’s movie, the most narratively unorthodox U.S. release I’ve seen this year, is as impervious to plot spoilage as ancient mythology itself.)

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