Begotten

More like, this'll be FORGOTTEN lololol

I saw a vagina.

A bunch of dudes on a beach dumping pudding on each other for an hour.

People say pretentious like it's a bad thing......

Pretentious boring art film that says nothing

As singular a film as any I've seen, an utterly alien vision of the world as a broken landscape of pain and suffering with fleeting glimpses of beauty. It's admittedly a slog in spots and I found it hard to keep my focus sometimes, but it's an incredibly admirable work of art.

Cliché, pretentious claptrap. The filming technique alone is nauseating, and not in a good way.

Despite it being a pretty short movie anyway, if you cut it a little bit then you eliminate some of the eventual boredom you'll feel... and then you can concentrate on the disturbing and inspired visuals and the great minimalist sounds. It would be better than an 80, which is still totally respectable. The beginning is incredible.

Don't really know what to think about this movie...........

Reading the summary for this movie inspires the ultimate WTF response. That's what made me sit through it. Unfortunately it is way too long - yeah I know that it's intentional - but it does offer a unique film experience. Eventually shock becomes disgust, which becomes morbid fascination, which becomes confusion, and ultimately even boredom. If this film would have avoided the boredom part, it would be worthy of a 80 or more!

At first I wanted to give it a higher rating, but then I realized that this movie isn't nearly as good as 'Morbius'.

I appreciate its experimentation, but honestly I was left feeling bored by the "shocking" visuals. I'm sure there are many pretentious film students out there who could school me on why it's such an important film of modern times, but I'm just not interested.

Yes, it's art-school garbage, but it's oddly captivating. Might have been incredible at about half the length.

The hyper low-fi visuals do have some sort of hallucinogenic properties and although this is objectively a big incomprehensible slog it is perfectly suited for a night of getting stoned and zoning out to black metal.

Okay, so you have made a movie that does a good job at being disgusting, disturbing and in general unpleasant to watch. Now explain to me: why should I want to watch it?

Weird....

The film's ambient, repetitive soundtrack was pretty effective. It has impressive commitment from the actors. As for the meaning or the filmmaker's intention, I have no fucking idea. However, I can appreciate it on some aesthetic and artistic level.

A savagely unique maelstrom of experimental photography and a surprisingly conservative theatrical narrative. It's noteworthy that Begotten evokes a supremely effective alternate universe that seems ancient and profound. It's best appreciated when you let the images wash over you and become entangled inside its strange web of enchanting imagery. The narrative and traditional structure are the film's greatest weaknesses but once you accept its rigidness the film maintains it's surreal cohesion.

Striking imagery, but could have been twenty minutes long rather than an hour and been much stronger for it. There has to be some mutual homage thing going on here regarding David Lynch; clearly Merhige watched Eraserhead a lot. Having seen the 2017 season of Twin Peaks, it's very hard to believe that Lynch in turn didn't see Begotten in the intervening time when you watch the woodsmen revive evil Cooper.

All I liked about this film was the opening, the cinematography, and the score. I think the rest of the film is a bunch of guys carrying a dead body over a hill.

It's unique, I'll give it that. Even though it's disgustingly gory, the fact that it's in faded black and white makes it watchable and the eerie soundtrack is very effective. But atmosphere and shock are all it has, and that gets tiresome, particularly in a film with no dialogue. Even with its short runtime I was bored.

With either a plot or significantly shorter running time, this movie could have really been great.

I can't help but think that this is one of the worse surrealist films I've seen, but despite that there's something Merhige accomplished within this film that keeps me coming back for repeat viewings. The visuals are over-the-top gross-out and don't have the subtlety of Lynch or the artistry of Jodorowsky, but they're still incredibly compelling to look at. You might not enjoy it, but it's hard to look away, and you'll revisit it occasionally with a kind of grim fascination.

It's easy to see why it gets a lot of flak, yet I found its madcap fever dream - up to a point - engrossing and hypnotic. It's fairly disturbing, though if I could fault it it would be that it seems like it is trying to be far more disturbing than it actually is as it lacks the emotional core needed to take it up that extra rung (there's a reason why Eraserhead is so disturbing after all).

This is quite a disturbing film largely due to the fact that the film appears to have been made in 1909 instead of 1990 which make everything just seem that much more unnerving.

Painstakingly lensed in supergrainy B&W and scored with a genuinely eerie minimalist soundtrack (birdcalls, heartbeats, buried, dirgelike melodies). A feature-length fever dream, this unspools sans dialogue or formal narrative. At 78 minutes, Merhige's hallucination eventually becomes an audience endurance test; the film would have been twice as effective at half the length.

Fuck tha haters

It's awesome that this movie was made. But I can't say that I understood it, or even that I enjoyed watching it very much.

"You don't get it"

In its bare form, this movie should be garbage. It's much of an art-school, masturbatory effort that lasts far longer than its welcome, but it is strangely engrossing. Minimalist in all terms, there is a strange beauty to this grainy hallucination.

Is this entertainment? No. Is this for everyone? No. I really don't know who this is actually made for in all honesty. To all those other than a prime audience in 1990 who have never been exposed to the modern internet, this will feel more like a film class assignment on why you should've stuck with photography instead.

Alien hellscapes are my jam.

"sick"

It's quite an experience, but i think a 10 minute video art installment in some remote dodgy museum seems like a better idea than a feature length movie.

Es la pelicula mas perturbadora, que he visto, a primera vista puede parecer una pesadilla o algo irreal, pero esta llena de significados religiosos, sociales, etc, la atmosfera en donde te encierra esta cinta es de otro lugar, ademas debo de agregar que fue hecha de una forma artesanal y tiene un algo nivel tecnico en su elaboracion.

So yeah. I don't know what to say. I mean, it kept my interest and had some pretty gruesome parts. But, overall, it was hard to make out what was happening. That was less to do with the narrative than the filming techniques; the last shots show what look like some kind of rotting corpse or something, but I couldn't really tell. That bothered me, I felt like I could get more out of it if I could see.

Is the most disturbing thing that i saw, but i think that it would be just a short film. there's scenes which is soooooo long.

Not my cup of God's semen. Let's say I had food poisonings and copyright law lectures more entertaining than this film, and I'd rather wash dishes for five hours than watch it again.

Begotten estreava há 30 anos no San Francisco International Film Festival. Pensei o tempo todo em Cioran assistindo a esse filme, veio uma vibe do Nietzsche também, mas não tão forte quanto o Cioran, não sei se o filósofo era cult há 30 anos como é agora e isso foi uma influência consciente, mas definitivamente deveria haver um nicho maior de horror experimental filosófico para nosso deleite e angústia. DVDRip no MakingOff.

I really enjoyed the opening of the film - its grotesque yet strangely ethereal, especially the "Mother Earth" sequence. But it just collapses into a heap of nonsense after that and the visuals were so bad I couldn't even tell exactly what I was watching.

Pretentious and incomprehensible but still rather captivating, although it's at least twice as long as it needs to be. Very nice sound and music.

I'm not going to pretend I have any idea what a single second of this 72 minute movie was about. I didn't. I tried, but after the first "scene" I pretty much pieced together that this wasn't going to be something easy or even possible to make sense of. While its developed a reputation through the years for a variety of reasons & does stand out through its style & sound, the point of it all was way beyond me & I was more bored than disturbed. Still, worth seeking out for novelty alone.

If I were a first-year film or art major, I would love this movie. But I'm not, so I didn't. The only reason why I didn't give it a zero is because there are some cool visuals and the sound is pretty cool.

Black Metal ASMR?

May 12, 2015 Murat

An interesting concept with some really great visuals. The opening ten minutes are amazing. Unfortunately, the movie runs out of steam early on and just gets tedious. There is a lot of symbolism and metaphors all throughout the film, but it's hard to care about them when I'm struggling to stay awake.

Staggeringly pretentious love-it-or-hate-it filmmaking. I'm firmly in the former camp, but I can't shake the feeling that I could have made it myself in a day or two.

Stunning and original in small portions but dosnt work as well for watching from beginning to end. The story is somewhat cliché but the backround noises and several of the visuals save it.