It surprises me that this movie has been so poorly received.

One criticism, which I summarize tendentiously to express my contempt slantwise, is that the dialogue is more beautiful and profound than ordinary speech.

Another is that the story is incomprehensible. One supposes these critics want plots and meanings served on a platter. One supposes they wish Hemingway had killed the old man at the bridge.

I could sketch my completion of the iceberg, but I’d rather ask questions. With whom is Malkina speaking on the telephone? What is the import of the theft from the thieves? Westray knows someone who can do a certain calculation in “their” head. The grammatical error is jarring—why does he make it? There are no definite answers, but the ambiguities emphasize the characters’ blindness and place their little hells at the center of the action.

Still another criticism is almost the opposite: that several deaths are all too predictable, and even the means of death foreshadowed. What suspense can there be when we know they won’t make it? But suspense is not the point. Rather we are to see them crushed by the fates they have invited down (a paradoxical formulation). And the foreshadowing is not gratuitous, but hints at the submerged plot.

The Counselor is a tremendously disturbing movie. It has haunted me for days. But with a rare power and unity, it takes up permanent problems of the greatest importance: The downstream evil a small selfishness can release. The doggedness of the past. The difficulty of untangling chance and fate and freedom. The incommunicability of absolute commitment. And the question whether existence is affirmable at its worst. Pay special attention when the cartel boss counsels the counselor. What is the fate worse than death of which he speaks? How is the counselor’s wish fulfilled, albeit not as he had hoped, in a way that gives no solace, within a world of possibilities he can no longer define?