After rising from a drunken fall, having finished the last of his fruit brandy, a doctor (Peter Berling) dresses up appropriately for the dreary, rainy weather and departs to make his way across a muddied road in the Hungarian countryside. He stumbles about slowly, almost glacially, stopping for moments as the rain patters upon his head. A single tracking shot follows the doctor on his long walk — it’s three full minutes, and in Sátántangó, Béla Tarr’s seven-plus hour epic, it’s a noticeably short shot by comparison to the others. That said, Sátántangó is a film requiring tremendous patience, with its gargantuan length far surpassing other lengthy films like Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour and Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. It’s a single movie only slightly shorter than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, only in Sátántangó, the film’s staggering length isn’t used to portray a sprawling, epic tale like Peter Jackson’s lauded films. Instead, Béla Tarr combines his film’s seven-and-a-half-hour runtime with an almost stagnant pace to express the futility and despair of his characters.