[A] careful look at Exterminating Angel reveals it … as Bunuel's best film, perhaps, and as a film almost alone in a mode that might be called existential surrealism.

Ever since Chien Andalou Bunuel has been expected to put oddly or outrageously juxtaposed images in his films, and not necessarily to have anything in mind beyond an urge to shock, or to express senseless violence, while doing it…. In Exterminating Angel, on the other hand, the events are generally impossible outside of dreams (truly surreal), but there should be no more presumption that they are therefore meaningless than there should be concerning the events in Viridiana, or that events in dreams are meaningless. (p. 29)

[Bunuel put something surreal into his films] because he meant something by it. All the more did he mean something by the central situation and its outcome.

This central situation—the visit of the Exterminating...