Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
Ancient trees half submerged in water.... a floating monastery. The place is quiet, enclosed in the utter absence of all sound except that of the monk’s movements, harmonising with nature’s tranquil melody. We see his young protege as he clumsily learns the way of serenity. His master looks at him; such pride and tenderness in his gaze.
But it seems for a moment that that serenity is fractured as the young monk is left to his own devices in the clumped trees surrounding the lake. We watch him scrambling after butterflies, throwing rocks at fish, laughing gleefully at the disturbance he spurs. He clutches at a fish, ties a stone to it and watches, giggling hauntingly as it struggles in vain to swim free. He does the same to a frog, and then again with a snake. Behind the rocks, his master looks on.
In the ignorance of his sleep, the boy is moved onto his back as his master ties a rock to him. Does it torment you? Yes master. The boy struggles in vain to stifle his tears. Go find all the animals and release them from the stones. Then I will release you from yours. But if you find that any of these animals are dead, then you will carry the stone in your heart for the rest of your life. The young monk finds all three, though only the frog lives. Upon seeing the dead and bloodied bodies, he weeps.
The film is one of spiritual striving. There is a sense of a kind of yearning for the ideal, a toil with the inescapable materiality of a world, and an utter rejection of this in favour of beauty in simplicity. But human subjectivity is an incomprehensibly complex thing... there are elements within us which are diametrically opposed, elements we cannot control, elements we are perhaps not even aware of.
A young girl comes to the monastery; she is sick. But she becomes representative of repressed desires... the awakening of sexuality and the lust that spurs only sabotage, in the eyes of the monk. To him, she is something vastly unattainable. But it is her very unattainability that invigorates his passion. When I can’t see you I go insane. What is wrong with me? His master watches the two, unsurprised though disapproving. Lust awakens the desire to possess. And that awakens the intent to murder.
The season passes and when the girl is cured and no longer in need of the solitude and serenity of the floating monastery, the young monk leaves with her. But he is soon to return. The world of men has grown agonising for you, hasn’t it? But the man who returns reveals a different facade... one of long marinated bitterness, slowly stewing anger that the outside world inflected onto him upon its exposure. Through clenched teeth, he confesses, my only sin was to love... I wanted nothing except her. In a haunting echo of his master’s words, we see his desire to possess, and then to spill blood. And so it seems that he must suffer physically so that he may purge his emotional torment. In his despair, he attempts to take his own life, though fails. Though you can so easily kill, you yourself cannot be easily killed.
The man is soon taken and his master is again left in his solitude. In the autumn, he burns himself alive. From the fire, emerges ice... it is now winter. The young monk now returns again, though much older, haggard and gaunt. A woman leaves a child with him and this boy, too, throws rocks into the water, relishing the chaos he is able to inflict on natural life. But rather than tying stones to the aquatic creatures, he forces them into their mouths, watching them writhe in the water and die. It is a disquieting echo, somehow more morbid than before.
The slow emergence of the seasons fusing with the film’s cyclical structure reveal a delicately poetic sequence of renewal and rebirth. It distances from the chaotic flux of modern life, detaching from that disorder to focus instead on something much simpler... A union with nature, and so with ourselves. But we humans are complex beings and not even the simplest of upbringings can quell that irrepressible fusion of desires and dreams, elements which collide and conjoin and cannot be suppressed. To be is to contradict and it seems that no matter the peace and serenity one is brought up with, the soul is magnetised to chaos and will find some way of disrupting that tranquility, be it psychologically or emotionally, though it is inevitable that it will in some way manifest into the external.