A cinematic meditation on the nature of religion and religious ideology

Rating: 10/10 (5 January 2017)

For those of you who go to movies with the expectation of being 'entertained' you may come away disappointed. As others have indicated, the themes in this work are repetitive, disengaged and monolithic.
What this film does do is point to the nature of Spirit. And how man's ideological impositions are, in the words of Shakespeare, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
What we witness is the huffing and puffing of Christian zealots attempting to 'support the faith' in Japan. Apparently, without any real understanding of the nature of the established religion, Buddhism, and by extension, no great depth of appreciation of the core of their own faith.
The remorseless churning by way of persecution of the non-apostates is in itself a message of consistency. And those of you who have practiced any kind of meditative system will appreciate the value of repetition for its power to disengage the mind from quotidian vicissitudes.
Thus was the experience of this reviewer. Om tat sat.