Mamoru Oshii’s 1985 Angel’s Egg is not a film you watch. It’s a film you absorb. Shadows, whispers, and the echo of a devotion that may never have existed make up its theology. A girl carrying an egg — fragile as faith itself — wanders an empty world with only the remnants of belief to guide her. Oshii, who was struggling with his own spiritual crisis during production, made a movie that feels like the inside of an abandoned cathedral: beautiful, towering, and aching with questions.
Religious imagery here isn’t decorative — it’s structural. Religion has always been one of humanity’s oldest design languages. Before we had modern aesthetics, we had symbols; before we had “style,” we needed to explain the unexplainable. Every culture builds its myths, but artists are the ones who turn them into architecture — visual, emotional, and sometimes spiritual. Every generation inherits its own idea of God, but artists have always been the ones who dare to retranslate that idea, distort it, hollow it out, or breathe new life into it. Religion is one of humanity’s oldest design languages, and even when an artist isn’t “religious,” the imagery lingers inside the work like a ghost.
Oshii’s world is a cathedral without a congregation, a dream soaked in midnight blues and abandoned architecture. The girl carrying the egg walks through ruins with the same quiet reverence a believer carries through a church. Nothing speaks, yet everything feels whispered. The egg itself becomes a vessel for faith — delicate, impossible, and painfully easy to lose. Angel’s Egg isn’t interested in answers; it’s interested in the gravitational pull of belief, the way doubt grows into a kind of religion of its own. You feel the director’s crisis inside every frame. Faith becomes landscape. Silence becomes doctrine.
If Angel’s Egg is the stillness of doubt, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain is the riot that happens when spirituality is stripped naked and forced to confront its own absurdity.
The film treats religious symbolism like a carnival, equal parts sacred and grotesque. Saints bleed gold; prophets hallucinate; pilgrims are mocked, tested, deconstructed. It’s visually violent, spiritually chaotic, and utterly sincere in the way only a provocateur can be sincere. Jodorowsky uses religion to expose humanity’s obsession with transcendence — how badly we want to climb out of our bodies and into something purer, even if the climb is ridiculous. In comparison to Angel’s Egg, it feels like stepping from the sanctuary into the street, where everything is loud and blasphemous and painfully alive.
Long before either film existed, Dante Alighieri carved out the visual grammar that still shapes how we imagine the divine. The Divine Comedy didn’t just describe heaven and hell; it architected them. Dante didn’t simply give the reader an afterlife — he gave it hierarchy, scale, light, and shadow. Most depictions of salvation or damnation today still echo his geometry. Every artist who uses circles, ascents, descents, or cosmic symmetry, whether they admit it or not, is borrowing something from Dante’s blueprint. He made morality spatial, emotional, and strangely intimate, and that intimacy continues to guide artists who are trying to make sense of eternity through earthly tools.
Fashion, too, has always been a stage for spiritual tension. You can see it in designers who never explicitly mention religion but create collections that feel touched by it. One of the most interesting examples is TAAKK’s “Rapture” collection, which treated divinity not as iconography but as atmosphere. White tailoring stretched and warped into silhouettes that felt like they were halfway through transcendence, as if the garments themselves were ascending or dissolving. There were no crosses, no angels, no borrowed Renaissance paintings — just the sensation of something holy slipping in and out of the fabric.
Jun Takahashi has flirted with this tension as well. Undercover’s “Fallen Man” used Renaissance paintings not as decoration but as a reminder that sanctity can be fractured. The prints were cracked, distressed, peeling — faith eroded by time, beauty surviving but barely. It echoed what Oshii does in Angel’s Egg: the divine made fragile, almost mournful.
What connects all these works is not religion itself but the gravitational pull of it. Artists return to the sacred not out of obligation but because it offers a scale large enough to hold their contradictions. Religion gives you language for awe, guilt, fear, longing — the emotions that swallow you whole. It offers structure, even when the work is about collapse. It becomes a mirror for anyone who has ever asked the oldest question in human history: What does all of this mean?
In the end, depictions of religion in art aren’t really about God. They are about the artist trying to design their own meaning. Angel’s Egg finds that meaning in silence. The Holy Mountain searches for it through spectacle. Dante builds it with architecture. Fashion expresses it through form. Across mediums, across centuries, the divine remains a canvas — painted, questioned, shattered, reassembled — until it feels like something human again.
