Film

The Holy Mountain

Name: The Holy Mountain
Genre: Drama
Released: 1973
Cast: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas, Zamira Saunders, Juan Ferrara, Adriana Page

Mythological fantasy
Strange
Slow-burning

Jodorowsky's baroque fever dream of a film: a thief, a general, a woman-shaped void, and four others are gathered by an alchemist to shed their earthly selves and climb toward enlightenment. Gorgeously grotesque, ferociously weird, operating on pure symbol and sensation. For people willing to abandon logic at the gate.

TMDb rating

3.8

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love films that trade plot for a barrage of surreal, blasphemous imagery and want to be provoked as much as entertained, with the sensibility of a mad, devout visionary.

Skip it if you need narrative momentum or a steady emotional throughline, since this one is episodic, deliberately repellent in places, and often more interested in shock than in making sense.

What it asks of you: A loose, unhurried ride of nearly two hours where images pile up faster than they explain themselves, so you must surrender to its ritual rhythm rather than wait for it to settle.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

8½1963

Fellini's director confronts his own creative exhaustion through hallucinatory sequences and carnival imagery. Like The Holy Mountain, it's simultaneously personal and cosmic, blending reality with symbolic dreamscape.

But It's 138 minutes of Italian cinema that meanders deliberately. If you need plot momentum, you'll find it frustratingly shapeless.

Synecdoche, New York2008

Kaufman constructs nested realities where a theatre director becomes obsessed with building a life-sized reproduction of his world. Both films dissolve the boundary between self and symbol, between the mundane and transcendent.

But The emotional density is suffocating and the structure is deliberately confusing. Some find it pretentious rather than profound.

Persona1966

Bergman strips cinema to its essence: two women, silence, identity dissolving. Like Jodorowsky, he uses striking visual language and symbolic abstraction to explore the self shedding its masks.

But It's austere and glacially paced. Long stretches demand your full attention and offer no comfort in return.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Holy Mountain

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Annihilation2018

Both are about a group moving through a transcendent space where the fundamental laws of self dissolve—but Annihilation achieves that dissolution through scientific language rather than mystical language.

Garland's sci-fi meditation on ecological horror and bodily dissolution dressed in rational genre clothes. Like The Holy Mountain, it's about venturing into the impossible to be transformed at a cellular level.

But It's a mainstream film playing by contemporary rules. Viewers expecting Jodorowsky-level strangeness will find it compromised and tame.

Mulholland Drive2001

Lynch's non-linear descent into Los Angeles mythology uses dream logic to explore identity and desire. Both films privilege sensation and symbol over narrative coherence, building meaning through image alone.

But The plot deliberately refuses to resolve. If ambiguity frustrates you, this will too—just more seductively.

Stalker1979

Tarkovsky's pilgrimage into a mysterious zone parallels Jodorowsky's spiritual ascent. Both are slow, meditative journeys through symbolic landscapes where the interior transformation matters more than arrival.

But Nearly three hours of minimal dialogue and glacial pacing. It asks for patience most contemporary viewers won't grant.

Eraserhead1977

Lynch's black-and-white nightmare of industrial decay and bodily horror shares Jodorowsky's commitment to visceral, grotesque imagery as spiritual metaphor. Both operate in the register of fever dream.

But It's deliberately repulsive and incoherent. The texture of disgust is the point, which many will reject outright.

The Fifth Element1997

Luc Besson's wildly ornate sci-fi opera shares Jodorowsky's maximalist visual language—every frame bursting with design, colour, symbolic density. Both are gorgeous and baroque.

But It's much more straightforward and fun. If you want mystery and difficulty, this popular blockbuster might feel like a letdown.

Beyond the Black Rainbow2010

Cosmatos builds a synth-soaked occult nightmare of colours and ceremony. Like The Holy Mountain, it privileges aesthetic and symbolic experience over narrative clarity.

But It's a low-budget indie that looks deliberately cheap. The plot is gossamer-thin and the pacing tests patience.

A Clockwork Orange1971

Kubrick's cold, symmetrical violence and symbolic language create meaning through visual and aural pattern rather than emotional naturalism. Both films treat the body as text and cinema as ritual.

But The assault and misogyny remain genuinely disturbing. Some viewers rightly find the clinical distance from suffering morally queasy.

Meshes of the Afternoon1943

The original avant-garde cinema of spiritual/psychological transformation through purely visual means—Jodorowsky extends and elaborates Deren's vocabulary into a feature-length ritual.

Deren's 16-minute avant-garde masterpiece is pure cinema of the unconscious—recursive, hypnotic, utterly visual. It's the template for everything Jodorowsky does, proving the form possible in miniature before he expanded it to feature length.

But Sixteen minutes, black and white, no plot, minimal sound. Even sympath viewers may find it too abstract, too short to settle into.