Under the Milky Way," a tune by the Church, a forgotten band that had a few hits in the late 1980s, captures the mood and atmosphere of Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light. The setting for the movie is a place that is somewhere "under the Milky Way." However, the place or planet under the glittering stellar disk does not look or feel like our home, Earth, but another world altogether. The main reason for this otherworldliness is that the people at the center of the drama are members of a German-speaking Mennonite community in northern Mexico. Their German language enstranges the geography, Mexico, and vice versa. A Central European language is naturally associated with long winters, black forests, thick and bleak clouds—and not with a sunny world of rolling hills and semitropical vegetation. Also, the habits, dress, and codes of the Mennonites are completely disconnected from the usual habits, dress, and codes of Mexico.

The result of this disconnection and enstranging is the appearance of a culture that seems totally alien. We see the farmer and his family, the farmer and his lover, the farmer and his friends in the community not with the proximity of human life, but with the cosmic distance of living and thinking creatures that have developed their language and customs on the surface of another planet and in the light of another star. The only special effect in this slow and carefully composed work of science fiction is produced by focus pulls. Flesh, flowers, folds in clothes move from blurry to terrific detail. The movement from one extreme (indistinct) to the other (very distinct) is a form of space travel—from nebulous clouds to the pores and craters on a single moon. Silent Light is one of the greatest films of this decade.