[In Le Testament d'Orphee Cocteau] observes the continuity of a dream and not the logical pattern of a drama. [The film] therefore proceeds broadly from image to image and from symbol to symbol in its presentation of Cocteau's poetic concept of existence, and like his other personal films it is a most powerful demonstration of the cinema's technical capacity to project the world of the image created by the fluent but captive imagination of a poet, who claims to be pressing passionately against the cell-walls of the mind for the release his spirit demands.

Cocteau the poet confronts the creatures of his personal mythology in settings which occur not because they exist solidly in time and space (the bare studio stage, the cliff path above the sea, the crumbling but still colossal ruins), but because the atmosphere they successively create is appropriate to the symbolic action taking place...