Prologue:
Okay so it’s in black and white. Notable notes: three figures labeled pain, grief and despair on table. Baby boy knocks them over when climbing atop the table to the window. Snow outside. Couple copulating in the same room; distracted. Antichrist with a female symbol for “t”. Man knocks bottle of liquid (probably alcohol) over during bed sex. Sex starts in shower. Baby carrying a bear, first seen floating in the nursery, tied to a black balloon. Baby speaker, can probably hear parents having sex in other room. Background music: operatic singing, women’s voice. Boy falls through window, orgasm upon his impact and subsequent death. From shower, moves to laundry room, then to the bed. The dryer is on, and stops at the end of the prologue.
Analysis:
Dryer and sheets inside–couple making a new baby, impregnation. Round window of dryer, reminiscent of pregnant womb. Alcohol knocked over—sexual intoxication leading to negligence. Black balloon tied to bear—balloon as dark, evil parents (or just the mother), “raising” the child (the bear) up, but all balloons soon deflate. The cold air outside would certainly deflate the balloon (chemistry…). Snow-innocence, the baby, falling towards the ground. Sex in shower, shower=cleanliness contrasted with dirty act. Dryer dries clothes, but also the couple, as they move to the bed….?
Chapter One: Grief
Okay so unlike the prologue, this section is much longer, so I will probably miss some things. Um Well the mother experiences profound “atypical” grief. Her therapist husband insists on taking her home, despite the disapproval of Dr. Wayne, the offscreen doctor. where her condition only seems to worsen. She bangs her head on the toilet some times….puts the pills in the toilet too. She is guilty. The husband tries to help. Oh yes in the beginning there walking behind the coffin of the child, the father sobbing with the mom silently staring at the black box behind him. They’re walking, and suddenly she collapses. She was in the hospital for a while, a month. The camera zooms into the bedside flowers, particularly the stems and the murky water. At home there are some strange and eerie foreshadowing visions of twisted grey branches/underbrush. “Anxiety” signs are shown in shadowy b&w scenes with close ups of symptoms like a pulsing neck vein for “fast pulse”. The mom is highly sexual, trying to use sex as a way of dousing her grief. The husband tries to stop her, but he gives in. They copulate once. She says he wasn’t a part of her and the son’s life before he died. He tries to make her confess her greatest fears, or places of fear. She says the woods “Eden”, though before she had always wanted to go there. They make it into the woods, and the scene of the forest is subtly distorted. She wants to rest, and while she sleeps, he wanders off and sees a deer. Turning, he realizes the deer is giving birth and his expression changes. It trots off. A significantly symbolic scene takes place when they’re on the train and she, in psychotherapy, narrates her travel through the woods with guidance from her husband. The scenes are slow-motion. The first shows her crossing a small bridge, everything is “silent”, even the stream underneath. The next she is crossing through some ferns a “lizard is hiding behind the fern, as usual”. It is not difficult to walk here. Next she is seen through a “field fox hole” among the trees and slopes. It is not easy to pass here, the ground feels like “mud”. She next passes by a decaying tree whose “trunk is thick”. It is decaying ever-so-slowly, and it has a “strange kind of personality”. Finally she is seen approaching the cabin, but before she enters, her husband tells her to lie down. A bit hesitant, she does so and her husband tells her to fade into the green, which she does, and it’s over.
Analysis:
There’s not much for me to say, the focus on the murky water of the flower vase might indicate the evil present in the mother, with the flowers being her son. Garden of Eden motif. Fertilization theme, with the deer and the offspring hanging out of its butt. Everything else for later expansion.
Chapter Two: Pain (Chaos reigns)
The wife comes to tell the husband that they should get going. He seems off-put by the encounter with the deer. They head towards the cabin and see all the places described by the wife earlier. First the bridge, which she crosses with great difficulty. The volume of the stream increases while she walks slowly across, before bursting away about half way through. The husband sighs in exasperation, and heads toward the cabin alone where along the way he crosses the field of ferns, the fox hole, and the strange tree. When he arrives, he spots the pile of branches to the right of the cabin a bit off. The wife is sleeping inside and he sees the polaroids of her and the child on the bedside table. During the night, we can hear the clanging of acorns falling down on the tin roof of the cabin. He opens the window to look, and falls asleep with his hand outside the window. When waking, he sees tiny grey pebbles stuck to his hand and peels them off confusedly. Later he is seen outside by his wife setting up stones for an “exercise”. From one stone to the other, she crosses the grass, though with great turmoil. For a second a vision of a bare foot (possibly hers) is seen stepping onto dirty grass. She reaches the stone and sits down, weeping while her husband consoles her on her good job. Suddenly a dead baby bird drops out of a tree, and a close up reveals its infancy and the ants covering its pale body. A grown bird swoops in and takes it into the tree where it promptly rips off the dead baby bird’s wing and eats it. The wife cries harder. Okay many things happened. She, while sobbing in bed, recollects the summer before where she hear a sound. She is working at her desk with a book titled “Gynocide”. The sound was Nick, the child, crying, and this sound permeated throughout the entire forest, but he was found in the barn, positively shining. The crying had no apparent source. She lies in bed, saying something about how nature is Satan’s realm, I can’t recall the exact quote. Oh yes “Satan’s church”. And the window is open, “that was his breath” as the wind blows through. She also deconstructs her prior view of the world, long ago when she found out oak trees live for 100 trees and they only need one acorn to propagate. Then she says now she realizes that Eden’s beauty might actually be hideous because all the lost acorns, and their cries of death, touch her..He has a dream of slowly falling acorns, like the opening scene in Melancholia. The next morning she is seemingly cured, frolicking through the grass and nature, stomping the bridge, waddling through the stream. But the husband, unconvinced, dons a skeptical look which the wife takes as his inability to be “happy for her”. She rushes back to the cabin, and in the field of ferns, while following her, he hears a rustle in the ferns a ways off. Before bending down to see what it is, a wind rushes through, stirring the ferns. It is a fox, who seems to be eating itself. Then, with a ominous voice, it says “Chaos Reigns”.
Analysis:
Long long long, expand later.
Chapter Three: Despair (Gynocide)
It starts raining without warning, and the man goes inside to find his wife sleeping. He notices an attic door, and curious, climbs up with a ladder to reveal its contents. Inside he sees pictures of gynocide tacked up upon the wooden walls, and the book shown earlier in the flashback “Gynocide”, on a table, extensively highlights and annotated. Besides the volume is something resembling a constellation map. A notable emphasis is placed upon three particular constellations named “The Three Beggars”, and they’re a fox, an unknown bird, and a deer. They’re each labeled pain, despair, and grief respectively, mirroring the three chapters of the book in which each one appears. He finds a journal where his wife must have cataloged her thoughts last summer, but as he flips through it, the handwriting is seen to debilitate, until the writing is nearly unreadable. Trees fall outside. The next day in bed, she talks about the evil nature of woman, but her husband refutes the idea, reminding her of the vary topic of her thesis, which was to debase the idea that she’s now embracing. They have sex and the wife implores him to “hit her hard so it hurts” whilst sobbing. He refuses, and she runs off into the woods. The wife is seen masturbating fervently in the forest to the sound of an eerie music, her husband joins her and they copulate. She asks again, and this time he obliges, hitting her twice before they embrace. The camera pans outwards, and we can see the arms of people, seemingly trapped underneath the roots of the tree. A reference is made to the Sisters of Ratisman who could conjure up a hailstorm. The next day she is seen throwing papers into the stone fireplace. She finds the autopsy report the husband had been keeping from her in the pile of papers. The report shows a slight deformity of the child’s foot, which we later see might have come from the misplacement of his shoes. The husband shows her this and she dismisses it as a weird “slip of the day”. He exits the cabin, through the thick fog, and into the shed where he reviews the photos, all of them with the same misplacement of shoes, left on right and right on left. A flashback reveals the wife’s deliberate intent to put the shoes on wrong, to the protest of the crying child. Suddenly, the wife bursts in with a wooden plank, hitting the husband and questioning if he’s leaving her. The crazy attack devolves (or evolves?) into a feral sex session, where the husband says he loves her, but she says he doesn’t believe him. The sex halts, and the husband falls unconscious, when the wife throws a cinderblock onto his penis. She strokes the shaft, and blood squirts out, staining her white floral blouse. Silently, she detaches a round cement block from its place and uses a drill to push a hole through his left shin. Using the circular block as a weight, she inserts a metal rod through his shin and screws the cement block in, as to incapacitate him. After doing so, she takes a wrench to the cabin where she throws it underneath. Meanwhile, the husband regains consciousness and with great agony, crawls away into the fox hole. Finding him gone, the wife hysterically shouts “Where are you!” and “You bastard!” repetitively. Inside the hole, he lights a match and finds something buried underneath the dirt; a raven, one of the three beggars, despair. It is inexplicably alive, and squawks loudly at the man. Realizing it is giving away his position, he begins pummeling it with a rock, but the bird remains alive. Finding his position, the woman tries to drag him out, but failing that, she grabs a shovel and begins digging from the top downward.
Analysis:
WOOOH!
Chapter 4: The Three Beggars
It is nighttime, and the wife is standing over a patch of dirt with her shovel. She starts sobbing and saying “I’m sorry”, digging out the man from the dirt below. He says they need to get the weight off of him, but she says she can’t find it, after honestly searching for it in the tool box. She helps him back to the cabin where he asks her if she was going to kill him. She says “not yet” and begins crying before stopping abruptly and says “a woman crying is a woman scheming”. Other portents include “when the three beggars gather, someone must die”. She kisses him and gets up to grab a pair of scissors. She lays next to him and takes his hand, guiding it towards her nether regions. A flashback of the prologue shows that she saw the child climbing onto the desk, and subsequently falling out the window. Crying, she tells him to “hold [her]” and proceeds to cut her clitoris with the scissors. She cries out and a deer in the forest lifts its head. Later, the husband, still on the floor, stares out the window and sees the constellation of The Three Beggars noting that there is no constellation named that. A cut from the prologue shows a deer in the window as the child falls through. A deer appears, and then a fox with a bell necklace. The raven is heard beneath the floorboard. The man breaks it and finds the hidden wrench, but before he can free himself, the woman awakes and they quarrel. She stabs him with the scissors, twice, but he manages to break free (with great pain). Now free, he pushes the woman to the wall and strangles her to death. Before the huge fight, some hail pores down, just a note. Anyways, the deed is done, and he cremates his wife outside on the pile of branches seen earlier. As he limps away with a stick for support, the transparency of the woods are elucidated and hundreds of naked bodies lie underneath.
Analysis:
blam!
Epilogue:
The initial slow operatic song from the prologue is resumed as well as the black and white color. The man is seen walking up a hill, and stops to consume some berries. He sees a feather in the bush, and sees the Three Beggars staring off to the side. Standing up, he peers down the hill and sees a procession of hundreds of women climbing up the hill. He is smiling. Just as many approach from the back, and the movie ends with a shot of the multitude of women climbing up the hill.
Analysis:
wow!
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