The latest film from Norte, The End of History director Lav Diaz, takes us into the heart of darkness, but at four hours it’s a frustrating experience

There can hardly be a deeper, darker vale of tears at this year’s Berlin film festival than Season of the Devil, the stylised yet starkly austere, four-hour film in black and white from Filipino director Lav Diaz, about the brutal period of martial law imposed on his country by President Marcos in the 1970s. I have had mixed responses to Diaz’s films recently: I admired the grandeur and mystery of his “Russian adaptations”, that is, his The Woman Who Left (2016), a version of Tolstoy’s story God Sees the Truth, But Waits; and Norte, The End of History (2013), a loose reworking of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Sometimes however, the sheer opacity and impenetrability of his film-making, and of course...