I can't say that I don't respect this film. There's a lot going on underneath, but it's one of those films that you either get or you don't. I don't think I fully got it, either in a intellectual level or on an emotional one. Even if the former doesn't come at first, if the latter does, that's all that matters. The film lost me, but I also know it's one that will benefit from rewatches and further introspection. I can't wait to really gather my thoughts on it to see how it fares with time for me. In the meantime, I recommend it, with hesitations, but only to the right people.

Came across this accidentally perusing new additions at Netflix. I hate to say it, because I like technical aspects of the film, but after a few minutes in when oddly misplaced Chinese girls tie the apparent Portuguese protagonist up I watched the remainder mainly as a geographical documentary.Confused? Read some of the other comments here. I haven't the heart to reprise scene after scene that to me make absolutely no sense. An element of suspense becomes moot when the viewer realizes there is no "there" there. Sexual innuendo abounds. The whole thing is manipulation pure and simple. Apart from the geography, that is. The nearest place I have actually visited is Galicia to the north, and I had no idea there was such an amazing back country, replete with virgin forests, whitewater rapids, fantastic rock falls, and fjord-like bodies of water.Mind you, I think it is worth watching again for some great camera takes. But ornithology it isn't. Nor is it clearly associated with St. Anthony of Padua (Padova) except for an obvious chord of someone lost and found...unless the viewer is moved to discover religious symbolism in ordinary natural phenomena.

Imagine if Robert Bresson and Walerian Borowczyk were a single person, a synthesis filmmaker. Now imagine that person is gay. Now imagine that person had a fever dream. That dream would be "The Ornithologist". (If you understood that sentence we're soulmates).If you're in the market for a psycho-sexual erotic biblical parable that flirts with bondage, urination fetish, bestiality, and just good old fashion beautiful men rolling around naked on a beach, but, you know, all done in an artistically austere, under- emphasized way and then hazed into a hallucinatory mist of a story, then this is your jam right here.What did I think of it?I thought it was AWESOME!

A staunch queer cinema visionary and nonconformist, Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues' fifth feature beguilingly takes a leap of faith onto a religious theme, a pilgrimage to Saint Anthony of Padua, conspicuously transcribing its story into the existential trials and tribulations of our titular ornithologist Fernando (Hamy), which is also St. Anthony's birth name, stranded in a modern-day Portuguese waterway and forests. Fernando, an atheist from the word go, embarks on his stork-scouting journey with gusto and alacrity, and the implication that it is not his first sortie in the area makes his adventure quite up his alley. Few background information is purveyed, other than he is under medication and has a male lover who is caring for him. Contrasting Fernando's bird-watching/telescopic angle with different bird's-eye views, it is the modus operandi brings home a numinous frisson of watching and simultaneously being watched, literally sublimates the nature's gaze with a plethora of wild feathered friends hovering around incessantly through the film. When Fernando's kayak is upset during the rapids, the story starts to take shape into a multi-layered religious mythology through Fernando's various real/surreal encounters, garnished with sexual innuendos (undressed and tied- up by two young Chinese female God-bothers, a sadomasochistic position enticing one's fantasy; the urolagnia experience in the darkness among a contingent of masqueraded roarers), and an in- the-buff dalliance with a deaf-mute shepherd boy named Jesus (Cagiao), which ends in manslaughter, a startling incident but concocted with blasé wantonness. Conceivably, when one liquidates Jesus, there is nothing but a road to redemption beckons him, Fernando must carry on his mythical transmogrification into a pious St. Antony by dint of his self- inflicted ritual for absolution (that is where symbolic tunnel, tableaux vivants and inscrutable gestures abound), consummated by being dispatched by the alter ego of Jesus, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, if credits must be given to Rodrigues' wheeze of contemplating a grand mythos within an entrancing temporal sphere, his didactic exegesis is less a merit to be reckoned with. Leading actor Paul Hamy credibly shoulders on a role which requires boldness and physical exertion, instils his open-faced earthiness into the overlaying mystique and alone-in-the-woods background, which successfully retains Fernando in the cynosure, even when narrative longueur inevitably lurks. Tellingly, the film renders a captivating landscape to those eyes yearning for natural's majestic design, whether it is the picturesque on the surface or the uncanny residing in the deep, also the foley artists (Nuno Carvalho and Martin Delzescaux) ply their own distinctive aural intrusion to that latter effect: eerie, preternatural and strident. In the end of the day, THE ORNITHOLOGIST is another contrived fable trying to mythicize religion in order to elicit a sense of meta-sanctity of our own existence, but the fruition thuddingly slumps between artsy-fartsy and nonplussing, on top of that, where are the storks, anyway?