Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
It feels like a dream. How sacrality is undying. Sacredness of silence, of the trees. Cleansing hands in the water, visions of the horse, torn paper to mimic the sound of rustling leaves only to look like bodies caught on barbed wire struggling, writhing, contorting. It is the mind in the grip of the ocean of solaris. It strains feebly— an enfettered will—, it is ensnared.
Simultaneously it is a nightmare. How dark, how cold, how distanced. An eternal recurrence, a perpetuation of human love and suffering, how agonising, how empty. Flitting from the motorway to the still lake, channeling onwards in that dark abyss, enclosed in an emptiness vaster than that inside. Hari’s torn skin, bleeding body. Self lacerations. Her eyes reveal the palpable disconnect of one who doesn’t know themselves. And yet it is she who is most glaringly human; the others crystallise into machines.
We struggle for contact, but we’ll never find it. We’re in the foolish human predicament of striving for a goal that he fears, that he has no need for. Man needs man.
The mind and the self are so incomprehensibly fluid, malleable, in a state of constant flux. And to know someone is essentially to absorb them in digestible psychic form— we absorb what we project, what we can survive with someone being. It is a kind of reverse solipsism— the self as nothing but others perception of it. For Hari, who does not even know herself, she has no subjectivity to project onto her perceptions of others, and so how can she herself survive, existing as she does devoid of a sense of self? She dissolves in the absence of a subject. Her dissolution physically represents the act of permanising that estranged self.
Above all, it is the struggle for contact. It is a struggle that nurses a haunting fear that any kind of self-expression, any movement to connect will meet with an insurmountable obstacle: with sterility, madness, numbness.
I am left thinking what exactly it is to push beyond the permitted limits of human thought and feeling.