The only way this movie makes sense.

This movie challenges any attempts to make any literal sense of what is happening.
Being a very literal person and a product of western traditions, I had to wrestle with it. It was a hard movie to watch.
I turned it off twice before finishing it.
Took me a month. It took me a month to watch this movie.
[And I've sat through Begotten.]
I didn’t like where I thought it was going. But I kept coming back. Too weird to pass up.

At the start of the final viewing, ⅔ through, I could only imagine one ending: as it turns out they were actually in some form of psychotropic therapy exploring their own minds.


But that wasn’t the ending. The ending doesn’t address plot mechanics.
What ends up happening is:
he now has to live with doubt. No matter which sofie she it, she would claim to be the HIS sophie. He will never be able to believe her
unless he chooses to.
And if he chooses to, she is.

This is the exact situation sophie was in after his affair. She couldn’t trust him. Without that trust, they couldn’t work.

The film’s narrative and strange, contrived premise serves as a vehicle to express a story, irrational as it is, of how these two situations, the one at the beginning and the end, mirror each other.
The film is a temporal sculpture with a fiendish symmetry and subtle descriptions of its own nature embedded in dialogue and plot. They speak of mirrors. The characters are reflections. Paranoia and trust are evident themes. The film speaks in a subtle tongue.

We don’t get an explanation, but we get to see there’s more than we understand going on.
At the end, as at the beginning, we are left with a choice that will define our relationship with the film: do we trust it?