Most critics agree, and warmly. Eight of nine reviews are positive, and the praise clusters around Bresson’s austere direction: plain images and sounds that critics find building toward something they describe as profound, heartbreaking and sublime. The donkey is the other point of agreement. Reviewers single out its unhumanised perspective, and the film’s refusal to sentimentalise it, as the source of whatever the film has to say about people. Several read it as a religious parable, and most treat the sacred and the brutal as deliberately balanced rather than at odds.
The spread is narrow and the reservations mild. Empire finds the religious overtones heavy-handed while still calling the film intelligent and morally serious. Eye for Film and Total Film are approving rather than rapturous, praising the unsentimental treatment of cruelty and the stark meditation on existence without going further. One review could not be read in full. Nobody argues the film fails; the disagreement is only about how far to go.