Simon of the Desert (1965)

Spine #: 460

Luis Buñuel's powerful forty-five minute short film takes place sometime in the 4th century where a ridiculously religious man named "Simon" is standing on the top of a ridiculously tall pillar in the middle of the desert, in order to feel "closer to God". After some time standing on this pillar (about six years or so) a problem arises in the form of Satan paying visits every now and then. Satan takes different forms when he visits Simon, but my favorite was that of Silvia Pinal, the actress pictured "getting familiar" with Simon above. The only flaw of this film was its abrupt ending, if this were to be feature length I feel it would have been one of Buñuel's masterpieces. The good news is Buñuel is not to blame, upon doing a little research I discovered he could not get funding to finish the picture and had to end production prematurely, preventing it from being feature length as he intended. Even with these unfortunate circumstances, I feel the film was still successful and highly recommend seeing it.

IMDB:******** 8/10

Netflix:****4/5