The plot of the film is not very strong, even a bit derailed and absurd. The theme is actually very simple: everyone wants to jump out of the mediocre daily life, find treasures, and pursue dreams. Even if this treasure does not exist at all, we will still stubbornly believe and continue to search for and move forward. The final ending is open-ended. It can be understood that Kumiko found the treasure, or it can be understood that she finally froze to death, and that was just a dream. It's a bit like a road movie, the important thing is the process of searching, not the result. After all, life is nothing but a futile effort.
Finally, at first I thought it was a film by a Japanese director, because it truly restored the depressive atmosphere in Japanese movies, not the distorted Eastern beauty in the eyes of Westerners. I think the reason why the director chose Japan as the starting point of the story is to understand the massive rendering of the nihility of life in Japanese literature, which corresponds to the theme of the film.
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