Begotten

60/100 Begotten is less a film than a trip, a black-and-white fever dream that feels like it was dredged from some pre-human subconscious. It opens with what looks like a woman disemboweling himself in a shack, and it only gets more cryptic and abrasive from there. There’s no dialogue, no conventional structure, and no sense of narrative progression. Just mutilated figures lurching across ash-covered landscapes, performing some unknowable cycle of creation and decay. It’s slow, impenetrable, and undeniably committed to its own madness. The visuals are the film’s only real weapon, and it wields them like a blunt instrument. The high-contrast, rotted-film look is legitimately unsettling, not just stylized, but hostile. There’s something deeply wrong about the way it looks, as if it were found buried in a box under a church floor. And for the first twenty or thirty minutes, that wrongness hits hard. It’s disturbing in a way most horror films aren’t even aiming for,  not because of what you see, but because of how disoriented and trapped you feel while seeing it. But once you’re acclimated to the style, Begotten doesn’t have anywhere to go. The imagery loops, the pacing crawls, and the emotional range remains flatlined. It wants to be mythic, but the symbols are so abstracted they dissolve into noise. By the halfway point, the power it had starts to drain, not because it gets safer, but because it just repeats. It’s exhausting without evolving, like a nightmare you can’t wake up from but also can’t feel anything new inside of. There’s no denying that Begotten leaves a mark. It’s not good in the traditional sense, and it’s barely a narrative at all, but it’s also not forgettable. Whether that’s a strength or a flaw depends entirely on what you want from a film. If you’re chasing atmosphere, raw discomfort, or a one-time experience that feels like staring into something ancient and broken, Begotten delivers, and then keeps delivering long after it should’ve stopped.