The Exterminating Angel feels like a feature length episode of The Twilight Zone. An existentially terrifying one at that. The premise is deceptively simple, a group of upper-class wealthy individuals come to an enormous mansion for a dinner party. After retiring to small room for the evening, the guests find themselves unable to leave. There is no physical barrier keeping them from leaving, no visible force holding them back. They’re completely aware that there is no logical reason they cannot leave, but every time they attempt to do so, they get turned around somehow. The majority of the film consists of a Lord of the Flies kind of situation where the guests steadily become more disheveled, impatient, temperamental, and generally unpleasant as they are trapped in the room for what feels like weeks. An older man dies, a couple take their own lives, a water pipe in the wall is broken to survive, and a bear chases some sheep into the room, preventing the guests’ starvation. There is no angel, let alone one who appears to be exterminating anything. On the surface, we can see Bunuel’s penchant for the surreal, as the whole plot feels like some kind of Lynchian nightmare. The conflict is beyond reason, there is no apparent threat. So what is Bunuel trying to say exactly? According to an account from his son, the answer is, well, nothing. This is a film, more so than just about any other I’ve ever seen that really doesn’t seem to have any explicit purpose. Experimental is putting it lightly. It can be read as a scathing rebuke of the bourgeoise upper class, carelessly and ignorantly putting themselves in a prison of their own construction, a minor inconvenience that turns into mortal peril because of their own inability to function without assistance. The servants leave beforehand, so maybe Bunuel is saying that without their help, the upper classes illusion of control is shattered, leaving them infantilized. But the ending of the film in particular seems to suggest something much more malevolent. The same thing happens again, but this time at a densely populated church. As another herd of sheep heads inside, possibly to be a proportionate food source for those trapped inside, some kind of riot takes place and people are shot. Is this the exterminating angel? Trapping people inside places until they learn something while Armageddon breaks out? Truthfully, I doubt Bunuel knows.