It’s about how the indigo darkness of a forest at night becomes a blanket, and about how the arrival of strangers can change a place (or change the strangers), and about the idea of something precious being forever lost.

As he's done before, Hamaguchi gives us characters who are too complicated and richly drawn to be reduced to any one type. Yet that doesn't explain how hauntingly different this movie feels from his other work.

It does reflect some of the struggles in modern Japan between rural and urban, but I thought it was a little bit too slow and not up to par.

Though not insignificant work, it is less an intentional spurning of the audience than a wandering artistic exercise, the success of which depends greatly on whether you find the film’s closing moments of piercing obliquity enriching or diminishing.