In a review of the film The New York Times qualified it as "one of those unusual works of contemporary art that demand from the audience a concentrated commitment – the luxury of time". This is certainly true, since Satan’s Tango runs for over 7 hours. The film, the story of the destruction of a farming community by a false Messiah-like figure who cheats them out of their money and hopes for redemption, is a real "slap in the face of consumerism and corporate taste", according to Kinoeye. This is true in other respects as well: it is in black and white, with extremely slow camera movements, and it features mostly non-professional actors.

Director Béla Tarr (1955) is often labelled as a "metaphysical" filmmaker, but he himself rejects this title and says that his films are "concrete", in the sense that they portray life. This generation, he said in an interview given to Kinoeye, can follow the logic of information and the logic of the story, but they cannot follow the logic of life. "If you watch the news it is just talking, cutting, maybe some action and afterwards talking, action, talking. For us, the film is a bit different", Tarr says.

Tarr has made three films based on Krasznahorkai’s works: Damnation (1987), based on a short story, Satan’s Tango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), based on The Melancholy of Resistance, the only novel that has been translated into English so far by this author, well-known for the German-speaking audience.

Krasznahorkai’s portrait on HLO