It's different. I'll give it that. It's dreamlike, disconnected and not really trying to make sense. It didn't grab me. If you're rewatching it and in the right mood, though, you might let yourself sink into it and decide that it's wonderful.

A matter-of-fact summary makes it sound like bollocks. A bunch of dickheads in the middle of nowhere don't get on with each other and haven't heard of just sitting down and talking. There's a tree called Charisma. They care about it. Should they protect it? Should they cut it down and sell it to a rich collector? Should they kill it because it's poisoning the environment? Most of the film is set in a forest... but it's a dying, desolate forest that's full of bare space and has only the bleakest kind of natural beauty. There's nothing pleasant about being there.

The main character is a detective (played by Koji Yakusho) who shows no interest in his wife, doesn't know how his son is faring and might be mentally ill. On finding a hanged man in the woods, he starts laughing. Someone tells him that he's been eating poisoned food and gives him some healthy groceries they've bought instead... so he throws away the groceries. He's not obviously suicidal, but it's hard not to wonder if, deep down, there might be a suicidal part of him. He objects when ordered to take time off work, but ends up being fired because he let a hostage die for no comprehensible reason in a hostage situation.

Off he goes into the great outdoors.

The supporting cast is defined by their relationship to that Charisma tree, or to the natural world in general. They all only talk to Yakusho. They're idiots. They're violent, or gun-toting, or think lots of things are poisonous.

The camerawork is... uh, can I say "classical Japanese"? Did Kiyoshi Kurosawa grow up watching classic 1950s Japanese movies? I'm thinking of the boring ones. Or maybe those with eccentric cinematography, like Ozu. Kurosawa pulls his camera way, way back from the action and avoids giving us close-ups. It's like watching security camera footage. It hardly seems worth casting actors like Koji Yakusho and Ren Osugi if we can't see their faces.

This is a strange film. Watching it on drugs would do your head in. My notes include "I DON'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT I'M WATCHING". Extreme things happen occasionally, but you won't always know what you just saw or how it fits into the film. "Was it you who set the car on fire?" (We saw it burning, yes, but we didn't know who or why.) Despite all that, though, the film's drab and boring. Does it have an environmental message? Technically, yes, but an obscure one. There are pleas to "restore the rules of the world", but the first man who says that is a murderous nutcase.

It's clearly not a write-off, though. Just calling it a bad film would be glib and simplistic. There's something compelling about it. Its strangeness and its unique rhythm make it almost hypnotic. Personally, though, I didn't care because I thought the characters were a bunch of twats (including Yakusho's character, because of his attitude to his family).