Hythlodaeus

I would love to discuss this on the message boards (as I have for almost 15 years before they were removed - are you listening IMDb?)

I don't want to give too much away but the ending will blow you away and at the same time make you say, "Yeah, I figured as much."

Anyone who cares about justice and is a student of human nature and society should see this film. All four of the lead actors are phenomenal which is why I watched and they didn't disappoint.

The movie is much about the nature of dysfunctional families but even more about the nature of how women and men are often fundamentally different in how they approach and deal with problems. Women often take an approach to preserve relationships and men go directly to a solution, no matter how stark - often both approaches having disastrous and unjust consequences.

This is not your typical Woody Allen humorous pointless urban angst film, or even a falsely deep gut wrenching trope. It is a film that many of us have faced in our lives (though less extreme most likely) with facing the fact that our children are bearing the consequences of our own inhumanity, that we have inadvertently taught them through modeling or neglect.

I can't believe this film isn't rated more highly. See it.

There are a few unimportant details that prevent me from being able to vote this higher but in many ways this movie was a 10.

This film blew me away. I was expecting it to be typical nihilistic garbage but I was surprised by the almost John Steinbeck way that at the beginning you have no sympathy, or even have hatred for the main characters, only to love them in the end as you realize that they are just like you. Also, they have a sort of nobility that you never expected.

The film doesn't have much character development but the development it does have is absolutely amazing. Somehow the movie is absurdly dramatic in some ways, but the overall tenor is that it is beautifully understated and as such many people will not appreciate it.

For those of you who have never struggled with an addiction or committed a crime, you will not understand the power of the group 12-step program scenes, the realization of who you are and what you have done that slowly dawns on a person. Also, if you have never been tempted to suicide or gotten into the heart and mind of a friend who is tempted to suicide, in order to help him or her, then you won't appreciate a lot of this movie.

The scenes with the adopted son and mother as well as with the mother and her daughters, and even the one with the man next to the river, and the man and his parents, were some of the most memorable I've ever seen, memorable because they made me do the work as the viewer.

Again, the power of the movie was what it didn't say, leaving the most important statements to the mind of the viewer, so that they can be said more powerfully than a filmmaker ever could. And in that way, my hat is off to those who made this film, they didn't pander to the audience, the movie held back so that it could be more than it would have been, giving the viewer space to learn about themselves as they watched.

I came across this movie by accident on Netflix and almost didn't watch it. It is a great little gem.

I'm not a fan of foreign films and especially not Asian ones (speaking as a westerner). Recently I watched several Indian films which were enjoyable but they felt American and also unrefined.

This movie was different, it wasn't non-Western really, but it certainly wasn't non-Japanese. I felt like I was meaningfully connected with a culture I knew very little about and I was very honored to have seen this film.

The film tells the story of an emotionally stunted young man who is a cellist and suddenly finds that he is unemployed and must give up his love of music and quite despite himself finds something else he loves, sending the recently deceased on their way to the afterlife. But like the love of music, this is something many people cannot understand or tolerate in the young man. In many ways, his young wife doesn't understand him either and we are left to wonder if she ever will.

Yet this is not really an art film, not one of those films where everything is left unresolved, but it isn't all neatly tied up either. It's a deeply satisfying and encouraging film.

It reinforced something I have noticed about Asians in other contexts that there is a depth of beauty and emotion in Asian culture that as a westerner, I'm often tempted to dismiss or ignore because I can't easily understand it. Asians are "weird" to many Americans - but one has to ask why America should be the norm to the world? This movie was deeply encouraging, dealing with timely issues of fatherhood and marriage, and also subtly, the destruction of fatherhood in the world (which many of the newer Indian films are dealing with in another way).

Asians seem to have very deep connections to their families and traditions that are falling apart as the world becomes more "global" - but those undercurrents are still strong and offer hope to a world that is weary with competition, cynicism and disconnection from family, from our traditions, from others and from ourselves.