“I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.” - Gustav Mahler

The year is 2022 and Todd Field’s first film in nearly two decades ushers us into a post-COVID-19 world where identity culture is pervasive, noise is ubiquitous, music is celebrated, and at the center, a maestro strives for the sublime via the classical.


Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), is a household name. Her accomplishments in the world of classical music are a litany of accolades, glory, and success so stunning that they border on satirical. A graduate of Harvard, Lydia is a distinguished member of the prestigious and highly exclusive EGOT club (winners of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony; a list which includes Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Hand Hudson, among others.). She was a mentee of the legendary Leonard Bernstein and has also recorded every Gustav Mahler symphony except the Fifth.


Furthermore, the progress of her career has seen her ascend through the great orchestras of Cleveland, Boston, and New York, to her current appointment as Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. It took me three days to finish this film. Not because it was boring, or tiresome, but because I honestly did not want it to end. And it took me all of 30 odd minutes to be convinced that I was watching a dramatic and visual gem.


Lydia’s interview at the beginning with the journalist, Andrew Gopnik —vainly playing himself and enjoying it— is a brilliant foreshadowing of events that plays out much later in the film, specifically concerning the film’s final act. “The Five is a mystery,” Lydia tells him. The number, “five”, turns out to be pretty symbolic. And when Andrew asks her about the difference in her interpretation of Mahler’s 5th Symphony and Bernstein’s, Lydia recalls her experience documenting the music of the Shipibo-Conibo natives deep in the Amazon. She tells him of people "who only receive a song if the singer is there on the same side of the spirit that created it. In that way, the past and the present converge, flip sides of the same comic coin.” Lydia then compares this musical belief with her mentor’s belief in teshuvah -meaning “atonement/return”; describing it as the Talmudic power to reach back in time and transform one’s past deeds.


We're dealing with a creative genius and powerhouse here. This introduction is followed up with a hilarious confrontation between Lydia and Max, a BIPOC, pan-gender student of hers, who dislikes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach on account of his fathering 20 children —an unforgivably misogynistic act in Max’s opinion. When asked if in the future he would like to be respected for his musical ability, or his gender/racial identity, Max calls Lydia “a bitch” and storms out of the class. But not before Lydia fires off one last salvo: “unfortunately the architect of your soul appears to be social media.”.



At this point, one begins to wonder, and understandably so, as to whether Tár is a statement on identity culture, contemporary Feminism, LGBTQ+, etc., or, an expose on cancel culture via the subjective experience of an art monster. Critics have fallen over themselves disagreeing over these issues. Yet, while agreeing on a single fact; that Lydia falls from her unique position as a rare female conductor of a major orchestra —losing her fame and family in the process— one aspect of Tár is rarely talked about by the same critics; its mystery.

Almost unnoticed, and coinciding with the appearance of the Russian cellist, Olga, in Berlin, many mysterious occurrences are uncannily introduced by Todd Field. I couldn’t help but notice how intense and weird things had gotten in the last quarter of the film. And with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that Tár is a story of ghosts. The ghosts, to my mind, belong to Krista Taylor, Lydia’s student who is portrayed as being infatuated with her, and Lydia herself. Whether the ghosts are literal or not, the director leaves that to our individual senses of perception. Let’s look at the hints.


In the beginning, while Lydia is in conversation with Gopnik, we are shown Krista’s head, full of long, red hair, in the crowd. This is before her purported suicide. Next, Lydia receives a book, Challenge, by Vita Sackville-West, once Virginia Woolf’s lover. The book tells the story of a woman who threatens suicide after separating from her lesbian lover. We’re led to believe that Krista sent the book because Lydia promptly throws it away.



At about the same time that Krista commits suicide, Olga arrives in Berlin from Russia and bamboozles Lydia, causing her relationship with her wife and daughter to deteriorate. Almost immediately, mysterious noises begin to haunt Lydia; some are melodious tunes, and some are horrifying screams. And not too long after, Krista haunts Lydia increasingly. In one scene, as Lydia returns to her pied-à-terre after lunch with her mentor, a ghostlike figure, with long, red hair, hovers unseen in the background.


These all set the stage for Tár’s pivotal moment. On a trip to Olga’s decrepit apartment building to drop the young cellist off, Lydia finds Olga’s stuffed toy left behind in her car. When she turns around to return the toy, Olga has disappeared. Guided by a gently drifting camera, we follow Lydia as she enters a building of dark passageways, decaying filth, and ghost-like footsteps. Deeper and deeper we descend, until Lydia turns and sees the silhouette of a massive canine at the end of the tunnel, staring straight at her. She flees, trips at the top of a flight of stairs, and smashes her face into the concrete floor. Later, after her wife cleans up her face, Lydia wakes up in the middle of the night to comfort her daughter, and almost unnoticed in the background, is a red-haired woman: Krista.


Tár had now entered the terrain of Stanley Kubrick, with hues of Michael Haneke. Are we seeing Lydia’s reveries or her subconscious fears? Is she still lying unconscious in the haunted Berlin apartment building? And where had Olga disappeared to? Is Olga even real? On the heels of these transformative sequences, Lydia Tár’s life begins to unravel spectacularly. First, a trending video on Twitter –and apparently edited– reveals Lydia abusing her student, Max. Next, a New York Post story accuses Lydia of grooming young female students of hers. She loses her family, the support of her foundation, her chance to perform the Fifth, and even Olga abandons her at the hotel.



The scandal effectively ruins Lydia’s reputation and throws her off the deep end where, at rock bottom, she storms the stage and violently attacks the inferior conductor hired to replace her. This last act in particular is so melodramatic it’s almost unbelievable; as though the director dares us to believe its incredulity. After all, everything was supposed to lead up to the moment of Lydia’s crowning achievement. And now a future existed in which Mahler’s Fifth Symphony would be missing from her career.


The denouement brings home the magnitude of what such an unraveling of mind and body could do to the psyche of a tortured maestro. On returning to her childhood home, we unearth glimpses of her past: a distant sibling, her real name, “Linda”, as well as the inspirations behind her career. Lydia looks dazed, wistful, and almost unfazed by her downward spiral.


Some time seems to pass by and she resurfaces in an unnamed East Asian city. At a massage parlor, the receptionist shows Lydia a room of young girls and tells her to choose her masseuse; “just pick a number,” she says. Suddenly, one of the girls looks up and stares at Lydia. Her number is “five’. Who is she? And why does her eye contact shock Lydia into vomiting in the street?


I now understand that Tár isn’t intended to be a film where answers to the questions click in place like the mystery of Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects.  Because, as Tár winds down into darker twists, it takes Lydia’s point of view and becomes more subjective; demanding that everything we see on a screen in today’s world should be questioned, and not immediately taken at face value. “The Five is a mystery.” Lydia presciently declared at the beginning. But when her chance at Mahler’s masterpiece comes along, Lydia is no longer on the same side as the spirit shadowing her; she’s on the other side of the world, conducting video-game music for a convention of cosplayers.