Simon of the Desert

Simon of the Desert (Simón del desierto, 1965) — watch online Luis Buñuel's razor-sharp surrealist fable on iFILM. This 45-minute Mexican fantasy-comedy was the director's final film before he left for France, and it stars Claudio Brook and Silvia Pinal.

Simon has spent years atop a tall stone pillar in the middle of the Sonoran desert, trying to reach God through sheer physical suffering. The Devil keeps showing up — sometimes as a flirtatious woman, sometimes as a sardonic traveller — prodding, mocking, testing. Buñuel compresses centuries of Christian asceticism into a brisk, merciless parable and then detonates it with one of cinema's most disorienting endings.

The film won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Venice Film Festival. It runs barely three quarters of an hour and lands harder than most feature-length religious epics. Watch Simon of the Desert online on iFILM.