I wish I had seen this movie without knowing anything at all about it. I knew two things going in (behind spoiler protection, if you somehow haven’t encountered any discussion of this movie and want to keep it that way):

Two things
  1. The movie is about cancel culture and me too.
  2. There is a vigorous debate about whether the ending is a dream.

And so knowing those two things really messes up the experience of what the movie is, and what I should be paying attention to. Because really, the first thing is kind of a throughline in a lowkey way for a lot of the movie, becoming more prominent in the second half, but knowing that it’s a focus of the movie ends up unbalancing what you’re paying attention to. Because if you didn’t have that context, the movie is really just this incredibly realistic portrait of this character — apparently in early showings, people got confused about whether it was a biopic, and I can completely see that, because it feels extremely real. (At one point, I was frustrated that I wasn’t going to be able to look on Wikipedia about Tár afterward, because I wanted to understand more about her childhood and early career that the movie only hints at.)

Like, I am not a classical music expert, but Tár talks about it a lot in ways that feel more detailed and… non-cinematic, I guess… than the usual ways movie characters talk about music; and they used real names for almost everyone who wasn’t a character in the movie, so when they’re talking about modern composers who Lydia Tár commissioned pieces from, they’re not fictional.

And beyond the music stuff, it’s just got a kind of almost mundane rhythm to it. Even the big mistakes Tár makes are believably the kind of stupid, selfish, short-sighted decisions that you can imagine someone like her making.

And as for the ending… okay, big spoilers here.

Ending spoilers!

Whether or not the events of the last bit are “real,” it’s certainly true that they’re heightened. After all this very grounded realism, when Tár goes into the abandoned apartment building and ends up in a hallway that feels like it was transplanted from a Tarkovsky film, it’s very weird. The part where she tackles the conductor who “stole” her symphony from her is believable, but the fact that he’s this guy who had been begging for her secrets and seemed like a third-rater, seems implausible (though apparently, there is a rich guy who conducted Mahler with a very similar name, so… maybe not that implausible?).

My take, which is worth what you paid for it, is that the events of the ending are supposed to be real and taken literally, but that the director is heightening everything and playing it more surreal to kind of reflect the sense of surreality that Tár is feeling as her life falls down around her.

Also, while it’s obviously a career step-down to go from a high-faluting fancy orchestra to conducting videogame music, I’m genuinely surprised by how many reviewers seem unaware that videogame music is even a thing. I suspect this is generational.

Overall, very subtle and fascinating movie, and I feel like this is going to be one of those ones that rattles around in my head for a while.