strange images

My guess is that these scenes are like an abstract artwork--designed to evoke a feeling rather than convey a literal image. However, to me they disconnected me from the story because I kept pondering the correlation. The only response they evoked in me was "this is weird." The slow-mo knife throw is cool to look at, but I couldn't imagine any symbolic interpretation of it--or of any of these ancillary scenes. Any symbologists out there able to make sense of them?

Here's a response from the NYT review apropos of this subject:

The imagery — of the natural world around the man’s makeshift tent, of an unnamed city (presumably the world he has left behind) — mostly has the force, if not the charm, of doodles in the margins of a text.