Oh, Quintet. What can one say about a film so bleak, so cold, and so unintentionally absurd that it makes an ice cube look warm and inviting? Directed by the legendary Robert Altman, Quintet takes us into a frozen dystopian wasteland where the last remnants of humanity play a mysterious board game with stakes as high as their collective ennui. It’s a film that dares to ask: “What if chess were depressing and took two hours to finish?”
Set in a post-apocalyptic ice age, the story follows Essex (Paul Newman), a wanderer with a permanent squint (likely from trying to understand the script), who stumbles into a decaying society obsessed with the titular game, Quintet. When his pregnant partner is unceremoniously blown up within the first 20 minutes—because this film doesn’t have time for joy—Essex embarks on a quest to… honestly, it’s hard to say. Maybe he’s solving a murder. Maybe he’s just bored. Either way, it involves shadowy conspiracies, game pieces, and a lot of people standing around in fur coats looking cold and philosophical.
Altman, usually a master of ensemble storytelling, opts here for a glacial pace that feels like it’s daring you to check your watch. Long silences are punctuated by cryptic dialogue delivered with the emotional range of someone ordering a sandwich in a snowstorm. The visuals are relentlessly bleak, with every frame bathed in frosty whites and grays, as though the cinematographer had been told to “make it look like the inside of a freezer that hasn’t been defrosted in years.”
And then there’s the game. Quintet, the central metaphor (I think?), is played with dice and a board, and the rules are never fully explained. This might be because Altman wanted the audience to feel the existential futility of life, or perhaps because the writers couldn’t figure out the rules themselves. Either way, it becomes an infuriatingly vague plot device, much like the rest of the movie.
Paul Newman, bless his heart, does his best to bring gravitas to a character who mostly wanders through snowdrifts and stares meaningfully at things. The supporting cast, including Fernando Rey and Vittorio Gassman, do their best to sell the idea that they’re caught in a metaphysical battle for survival, but the script gives them little to work with beyond stilted dialogue and an ever-present sense of impending frostbite.
And yet, despite its flaws—and there are many—there is something strangely hypnotic about Quintet. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash in a blizzard: baffling, grim, and oddly captivating. Altman’s commitment to the bleakness is almost admirable, and the sheer audacity of making a film this opaque, this deliberately unentertaining, is worth a kind of begrudging respect.
Would I recommend it? Yes, but only to those with a high tolerance for cinematic despair and an appreciation for experimental sci-fi that takes itself way too seriously. Quintet isn’t a film you enjoy; it’s a film you endure, ponder, and eventually recount to confused friends as a badge of your cinematic fortitude.
Rating: 2.5 monocles out of 5
For its icy atmosphere, Altman’s boldness, and Paul Newman’s ever-watchable presence—but docked for being a borderline incomprehensible slog that leaves you colder than the film’s frozen wasteland.