So here’s another Luis Buñuel movie. I had started off unimpressed with Buñuel — he seemed like an edgelord who was more interested in shocking people than making interesting movies — but between Los Olvidados and this, I’m warming up to him.

So this movie is about rich people hosting a dinner party. It starts out with a kind of weirdly ominous feeling, as servants leave in advance of guests arriving, for no obvious reason. When the guests do arrive, there are strange moments where events repeat — someone walks into a hall that they just walked into, that kind of thing. And then the party is weird in mundane ways that can only be described as “rich people shit.” There’s a bear, for instance. The food is weird. There are some genuinely insane conversations. After dinner, everyone withdraws to the living room, and the party continues until the wee hours of the morning, and people start falling asleep in the living room.

And when they wake up… they request breakfast in the living room. At some point, this starts feeling odd to people, and discussions break out about why nobody’s leaving. And with some experimentation, it turns out that they can’t leave. Every intention to do so just dissipates, and even as they start panicking about this situation, they are somehow stuck in this living room for no obvious reason.

I was actually expecting this to kind of be an unspoken subtext for a long time, but no: It turns out to be extremely spoken, and it’s the explicit driver of the movie very quickly, even down to the practicalities of the logistics. There is a toilet in the area they can use, thankfully, but there’s no food or water. They eventually break into the wall and get at a water pipe to solve the water problem, but food remains an issue as they are there for days. (To give a bit of a spoiler: they do not resort to cannibalism.)

At some point, as this movie is turning very claustrophobic, we get a view outside, to find out that the police and fire departments are trying to get in to rescue them, but can’t get in for the same reasons the people can’t leave: At every attempt, they lose their motivation and decide not to.

And so yeah, this is what the movie is about, this tense situation where all these party guests are trapped in a room together. There are various interpersonal dramas (unsurprisingly, some of the rich people are having affairs, and some of their polite friendships turn rather less polite when the situation becomes more stressful), there is the threat of violence, there are various illnesses and infirmities, and there is just the steadily increasing madness of a group of people trapped in a situation they inexplicably can’t leave.

There’s obviously a huge degree of social satire involved here, as Buñuel strips away the layers of sophistication and elegance that these rich people started the party with; but honestly, this is just a really solid pressure-cooker of a movie. (And it’s only ninety minutes, so while the guests may have outstayed their welcome, the movie doesn’t.)