This meditative little gem of a movie is based around five discrete sections, all centered on a small wooden temple in the middle of an isolated lake. As the film starts, the monk there is raising a young boy, trying, in his own quiet ways, to instill a sense of morality into the child. As the film progresses, we move from season to season, from year to year, from stage of life to stage of life. I really don’t want to say anything else specific about the movie because it’s a treasure that should be slowly unwrapped and savored by each individual viewer. The film is beautifully shot; as the film goes along and we see the small wooden temple and the surrounding wilderness in each season, I kept feeling that each new season we were seeing was surely the most beautiful. The film is also beautifully written, filled with layers and layers of meaning, which, again, I will not unpack for you – there’s ambiguity here that each individual viewer can find their own, very personal meanings in. I’ll just say that this is an excellent character study of both the monk and the young boy as they grow in years, the ways they change and the ways they don’t feeling very real and very powerful. This movie is, however, also very much an exploration of ideas and its use of symbols is artistic and smart. The movie compares each season to a stage of life, but, since we are following the monk and his pupil, each season is really tied to two different stages of life and also to a relationship. In the opening segment, the season is spring and we see a child in the spring of his life, but also a monk in the spring of his adulthood; the relationship between the two characters is also in its spring. When we jump ahead a few years to the summer section, we find both characters in a different place and their relationship in a different place as well. Likewise, each segment features an important animal, a different species in each segment; there’s meaning there as well for you to tease out. All of the performances are seamless and beautiful. Yeong-su Oh, Young-min Kim, Jae-kyeong Seo & Jong-ho Kim are all wonderful as the main two characters over their lifetimes. Writer-director Ki-duk Kim also appears in one segment and is excellent. Yeo-jin Ha, Dae-han Ji & Min Choi are also very good in small supporting roles. I would advise you against looking at IMDB prior to seeing this film; the cast-list, in providing a couple of character names, reveals a couple of plot related turns that I wasn’t expecting at all. The film is, ultimately, just extremely beautiful and I found it very emotionally moving and thought-provoking as well. It’s a very minimal film, beautifully shot, but never ostentatious. There’s a run of about twenty minutes at one point without a single line of spoken dialogue. Its rhythms are slow and its beats are quiet. It’s one of those “pure cinema” movies and I’d love to get the chance to see it on the big-screen sometime. I turned around and watched it a second time the day after I first watched it and there are ambiguities I’m still turning over in my mind, days later. It’s a true masterpiece. 4 stars.
tl;dr – quiet, meditative film follows a monk and his pupil through the seasons of the lives in five vignettes; a beautifully shot film with riches to unpack. 4 stars.