NOTE: The below Blu-ray and 4K UHD captures were taken directly from the respective disc.

ADDITION: Criterion 4K UHD (November 2025): Criterion have transferred Luis Buñuel's Él to Blu-ray and 4K UHD. The 4K restoration of Él - completed in 2022 at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Les Films du Camélia, and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna (with support from OCS and in association with Películas y Videos Internacionales) - is a miracle of preservation given that it was struck from a dupe positive (the best surviving element), preserved by Películas y Videos Internacionales and scanned at the Filmoteca de la UNAM. Yet the results, with grading supervised by Gabriel Figueroa Flores, are nothing short of magnificent: the image possesses a gritty depth, with velvety blacks, razor-sharp highlights, and perfectly resolved grain that makes Figueroa’s high-contrast lighting look freshly minted. Shadows carve Arturo de Córdova’s face like scalpels, marble floors gleam with cold opulence, and every static composition feels newly weaponized in its elegance. Gabriel Figueroa’s (Under the Volcano, The Border, Kelly's Heroes, Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Big Cube, Simon of the Desert, The Night of the Iguana, The Exterminating Angel, Nazarin, Victims of Sin, The Young and the Damned) black-and-white cinematography in Él is deceptively classical - almost perversely so. He gives the film the polished, expensive sheen of a 1940s Hollywood melodrama (think Hitchcock’s Rebecca or Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman,) all gleaming parquet floors, crisp tuxedos, and immaculate high-ceilinged bourgeois interiors, so that when the rot beneath the surface finally erupts it feels even more obscene. Francisco’s face is often carved in hard, sculptural contrasts - deep cheekbone shadows, gleaming foreheads, eyes burning like hot coals - while Gloria is kept in a softer, more diffused glow that gradually hardens as her terror grows. The camera rarely moves; Buñuel and Figueroa prefer long, static takes and perfectly symmetrical compositions that trap the characters inside rigid architectural frames (doorways, staircases, church pews.) This is not merely the theoretical perfection of an original-negative scan but the real-world triumph of master restorers turning a second-generation element into demonstration-grade 4K black-and-white cinematography that ranks among Criterion’s most appreciated efforts.

Like 4K UHD transfers of The Long Wait, I, the Jury, and many others below, Criterion's 2160P transfer of Luis Buñuel's "Él" does not have HDR applied (no HDR10, HDR10+, nor Dolby Vision.) We have seen many other 4K UHD transfers without HDR; Mondo Macabro's Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf, Cult Film's Django 4K UHD, Umbrella's 4K UHD transfer of Peter Weir's The Last Wave, Radiance's Palindromes, and Criterion's 4K UHD transfers of Deep Crimson, Killer of Sheep, Chungking Express, Winchester '73, The Mother and the Whore, I Am Cuba, The Others, Rules of the Game, Branded to Kill, In the Mood For Love, Night of the Living Dead, Fires on the Plain, and further examples, Masters of Cinema's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Kino's 4K UHDs of Bob le Flambeur, Last Year at Marienbad, Nostalghia, The Apartment, For a Few Dollars More, A Fistful of Dollars, In the Heat of the Night, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, as well as Koch Media's Neon Demon + one of the 4K UHD transfers of Dario Argento's Suspiria.

Before the DVDBeaver website's format was established we reviewed a Mexican DVD of Él  - over 20-years ago HERE.

NOTE: We have added 84 more large resolution 4K UHD captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray and 4K UHD, Criterion use a linear PCM mono track (24-bit) in the original Spanish language. The uncompressed monaural soundtrack is presented with crystalline purity - no hiss, no wow, no flutter, just the dry, airless acoustic of 1950s Mexican high society. Buñuel uses sound in Él with the same sadistic economy he applies to image. There is almost no non-diegetic music for the first hour; instead we get the brittle clink of crystal glasses at dinner parties, the nervous rustle of silk dresses, the distant murmur of polite conversation that Francisco increasingly experiences as mocking laughter aimed at him. Dialogue is anchored dead-center and impeccably clean, allowing every nervous swallow, every whispered accusation, and sudden outburst to land with maximum force. The sparse sound design - distant church bells, the metallic clink of a dropped sewing needle, the hollow echo of footsteps in an empty mansion - acquires an almost physical weight. Luis Hernández Bretón’s (Luis Buñuel's Illusion Travels by Streetcar, Arturo Ripstein's La tía Alejandra, Miguel Morayta's The Bloody Vampire) occasional salon waltzes sound deliberately tinny and dated, heightening the sense of emotional suffocation. This is not a track that will rattle your subwoofer, but it is a precisely engineered mono mix; the silence between sounds is often more uncomfortable than the sounds themselves. Criterion offer optional English subtitles on their Region 'A' Blu-ray and Region FREE 4K UHD.

The Criterion 4K UHD has assembled a remarkably strong, Buñuel-centric supplement package - all on the second disc Blu-ray. Guillermo del Toro’s 1/2 hour appreciation is pure cinephile joy - passionate, precise, and frequently hilarious as he connects Él to the director’s lifelong war against bourgeois hypocrisy and Catholic repression. The new 22-minute video essay by scholar Jordi Xifra (Diccionario Buñuel) is excellent academic contextualization, smartly linking the film to Mercedes Pinto’s original novel and Buñuel’s Spanish roots. The 1981 Jean-Claude Carrière (The Secret Language of Film) interview with Buñuel himself is priceless late-period testimony, while the 2009 panel discussion moderated by José Luis Garci (Begin the Beguine) offers warm, anecdote-rich reminiscences from people who knew him. The booklet features a strong new essay by Fernanda Solórzano (Cinécdoque) and a classic 1970s interview with Buñuel by José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent (Buñuel by Buñuel: Interviews and conversations with Luis Buñuel.) Only quibble: no audio commentary, but what’s here is so deep it barely matters.

Luis Buñuel's Él is one of the cruelest, most clinically precise films ever made about erotic obsession. Shot in a mere nineteen days on a modest budget during Buñuel’s Mexican period, it remains, alongside Los Olvidados and The Exterminating Angel, one of the peaks of his career. Adapted from a 1926 autobiographical novel by the Spanish-Uruguayan writer Mercedes Pinto (Merceditas) Pinto, the film transposes the action from 1920s Madrid to 1950s Mexico City without losing a particle of the original’s venom. What Buñuel achieves is nothing less than a secular exorcism: he exposes the infernal fusion of Catholic guilt, patriarchal entitlement, and sexual paranoia that turns bourgeois marriage into a torture chamber. Buñuel structures the film as a slow tightening of the noose. The first hour plays almost like a conventional melodrama of manners, lulling the audience into thinking they are watching a portrait of an “eccentric” husband. Then, imperceptibly, the surreal intrudes - not through the oneiric set pieces of Un chien andalou or L’Âge d’or, but through the terrifying logic of Francisco’s own psyche. When he imagines hearing laughter behind walls, Buñuel gives us a brief, disorienting sound mix that makes us question whether the laughter is real or not - until we realize the only madness is Francisco’s. Rarely has a film so completely stripped love of its romantic illusions while remaining so bitterly funny. Él is not a tragedy; it is a comedy of damnation, and its laughter sticks in the throat. Seventy years later, it remains Buñuel’s most unflinching portrait of the bourgeois male id - and one of the most essential films ever made about how desire, when poisoned by power, becomes indistinguishable from the will to destroy. This 4K UHD release transforms a longtime cult masterpiece into an essential, urgent viewing experience. If you are keen on Buñuel, Figueroa, or the cinema of psychological cruelty, this belongs on your shelf. Absolutely recommended.

Gary Tooze