EVIL DOES NOT EXIST (Spoiler Discussion)
Added 2024-05-10 14:15:22 +0000 UTCI'm really really hoping at least someone on here has seen this. That ending...left me really stunned and admittedly a little confused. With some reflection I'm tying the pieces together, and yet still lost about what some of it means to me metaphorically. No question, I have to watch it again before I can review it. But if you guys have seen it, please tell me how you read that ending, and how it made you feel.
Comments
That's more or less how I saw it. And that's where the title comes in, which is quite a sharp in tone. But I don't think you should take the title super seriously. I see it simply as a bold idea or statement thrown into the ether of this world. It can be challenged or entertained. The complexities of how life achieves natural order are beyond comprehension, and I don't believe the film necessarily wants to explore it so much as it wants to observe it in a sort of mystifying way, and accept it. There's little logic to what is happening there and this is the part that I'm still trying to wrap my brain around. But I stop questioning at a certain point why there's almost a fourth wall break early on, or whose POV we are experiencing as the camera. I'm not even sure it really matters too much. Life is always awake around us in some form. And perhaps there's a connected feeling of observance and vision that weaves through everything here.
Deepfocuslens
2024-05-11 00:42:52 +0000 UTCI’m in the same boat. I’m not entirely sure, and I still don’t know how the title fits into the story, so yeah I def need like 2 or 3 rewatches lol The shots of the deer attacking the girl are probably a flashback. And I think maybe the reason Takumi attacks Takahashi is that he’s gone rabid like the deer’s mother. The movie draws a lot of connections between the people living in the community and the natural setting. In the town hall, the main point of the leader is that everything is connected by the water. Also, earlier in the film, Takumi says that the deer are passive, but will only attack if they feel a threat to their young. Maybe he’s so connected to the forest and to nature that he attacks Takahashi as a way of rabidly protecting his daughter, but also as an extension of the ecosystem. Maybe the ecosystem itself is reacting to Takahashi and Mayuzumi like they’re a disease endangering a body.
Jared Angcanan
2024-05-10 18:52:11 +0000 UTCthe key is really this wounded deer metaphor
Herbert Baker
2024-05-10 16:49:33 +0000 UTCAnother thing I'd like to add, even if this is random...so much of the film I responded to strongly. But not the music. Perhaps that's just my bias. I am really sick of post-minimalist modern classical music in the style of Max Richter lol. It's that heavy chamber strings quality mixed with the weepy sentiment melodically that I can never get behind. This score had a little bit of that in it, which made the emotions bubbling to the surface, seem a tad too obvious for me. I wish the music had been a little more muted and still, or less on the nose. Though when the music began to have a dissonance to it, it become more interesting at points.
Deepfocuslens
2024-05-10 14:43:33 +0000 UTCI do believe however, that the deer was there. Just...not in that moment. I think what we see there, is more a dreamy reconstruction perhaps, of what may have happened either just before, or back when we heard the gunshots slightly earlier in the film.
Deepfocuslens
2024-05-10 14:27:42 +0000 UTCI agree that I don't think the Deer is there also. But I'm less concerned with what we see, and I'm more concerned with why we see it. Or why we are given certain point of views of characters through that interpretation. I think I do understand why our main character reacts the way he does to the situation, but I am still trying to comprehend how this ties into earlier thematic ideas in the film. Again, this is why I want to see it again. But yeah...confusing. Very confusing. Whose point of view is that we see in the very end looking up? Is it Takahashi? Is it the girl? And why?
Deepfocuslens
2024-05-10 14:26:04 +0000 UTCI had the privilege of seeing it at NYFF last year and everyone literally had the same "WTF" reaction to the ending. Like, we're talking some people suppressing their laughing in complete disbelief. I haven't seen the film since, so my memory is really hazy, but I think the deer wasn't actually there. It doesn't make sense logically if it was.
vince2k
2024-05-10 14:18:25 +0000 UTC
