- Year
- 1989
- Country
- Mexico
- Runtime
- 122 min
- Director
- Alejandro Jodorowsky
- Updated
- 9 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (26/100)
- Also known as
- Holy Blood
Santa Sangre
Jodorowsky's late masterpiece. A circus, a cult, an armless mother, and her son's hands.
Alejandro Jodorowsky's return to form after years away, and his most accessible major film. A young man raised in a circus and traumatised by his knife-thrower father and armless cult-leader mother becomes, as an adult, the literal arms of his mother, murdering at her command. It is a giallo, a melodrama and a surrealist confession at once.
It is beautiful, violent and deeply strange, drawing on real crime and Jodorowsky's own obsessions. More coherent than his 70s work without losing the delirium. One of the great films of transgressive cinema.
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