My Interpretation (Spoilers!)

I couldn't sleep this morning and this was on Netflix, so I decided to give it a go. I finished it right before I needed to start getting ready for work and, needless to say, I couldn't stop thinking about it all day.

It's one of those movies that's hard to like, but even harder to let go of, because the trauma of what the characters endure becomes your own by the visually visceral telling of it. Or, at least that's what happened with me, because I've been thinking about this movie literally all day, particularly what exactly the hell it was that I had spent two hours watching.

That said, I had a sort of epiphany this evening and I think I've come to a reasonable conclusion (at least a satisfyingly reasonable conclusion for me):

*Spoilers!*

At first I took the movie at purely face value--although, obviously that's pretty hard to do in this case--and thought it was just about an abused little girl and the mental breakdown of the mother after her unwarranted jealousy caused her to abuse her daughter, which resulted in the accident on the stairs.

So, clearly the movie is from either the perspective of the mother or of the daughter, but it seems nearly impossible to tell from which one. This seemingly deliberate ambiguity makes me wonder if it even matters which character's mind we're in, because the whole point of the film seems to be about the psychological dissociation that happens with the experience of extreme trauma.

I would say it's pretty evident that the daughter was more psychologically traumatized than her mother, but the mother was clearly traumatized as well.

For what it's worth, I believe the movie takes place in the mother's mind and that the movie switches it's point of view from her to her own manifestation of her daughter, which became a second identity due to dissociation. At some point her mind wasn't capable of continuing on in that manner, for whatever reason--maybe because the real-world Yuji was screwing with her in order to find out the truth about her and she finally cracked. Or, maybe she just wasn't capable of handling the truth viz. that she watched her daughter be abused and did nothing, that she herself abused her daughter out of jealousy, etc.. Regardless, there were clearly two personalities struggling for dominance in her mind: her own and her daughter's. In the end, I believe the hotel room was representative of the real world--she didn't have her wheelchair and whether that was because Yuji was screwing with her or trying to help her, the result remains the same: this truth he's presenting her with (viz. that she doesn't need a wheelchair) causes her to acknowledge that she's not Mitsuko, which in turn causes the identity of Mitsuko that she had created in her own mind to struggle for survival. In the end, she willingly sacrifices her own personality so that her daughter's can live on in her. Whether this is a result of guilt or denial, or a little of both, I'm not sure. I want to say that she finally comes to terms with the truth and just blatantly rejects it out of pure guilt.

The executioner and MC of the circus was her husband, because he is the one who caused the trauma related to the dissociation and breakdown and he's ultimately the one still in control.

But even if I'm wrong and the movie is from the little girl's perspective and the mom is one of her alter-egos, the point remains the same: the movie seems to be about psychological dissociation due to extreme psychological trauma.

So, those are my long-winded thoughts on the matter. So, my initial interpretation of the movie remains virtually the same, only now (hopefully) more well conceived.

Any comments or other insights beyond my own would be appreciated. I just needed to get this down here and out of my mind so I can stop thinking about this gut-wrenching movie and go to sleep.