I expected to like this going in. I'm usually very open to "difficult" pieces of media. Gene Wolfe is my favorite author, after all, which is actually how I came to this movie in the first place, as many people on the internet seem to think it was directly inspired by The Book of the New Sun in some meaningful way and having watched it I guess I can see where they're coming from but the connection is slight if it's there. A cloaked young man bearing a cross-shaped weapon in a dying world of ancient architecture mixed with strange futuristic technology, a focus on flood imagery and rebirth, etc.
I think the main disconnect for me here is that this is very obviously a piece of visual art rather than a difficult or abstruse story, which is what I was expecting. In reality, there just isn't a story. The director himself has said he doesn't know what the movie is about, and while I don't think there's anything wrong with making a movie that way, I feel like I could absolutely tell the difference. There are plenty of things I've watched/read that I was completely perplexed by, but somehow could tell that at least the creator knew what it was about and thus there was some internal logic there that I could latch onto and perhaps puzzle out if I spent the time on it or looked into what others had found out. With Angel's Egg, that way lies madness and dissatisfaction.
Beyond a very surface level symbolic interpretation that it's probably, to some degree, about his loss of faith in Christianity, hence all the religious symbolism and the longest dialogue scene being a recounting of Noah's flood with a dark and nihilistic twist at the end, there's just nothing here beyond the visuals, which are pretty open to be interpreted however somebody wants to interpret them. I am very much a student of storytelling, not a student of visual art. Don't get me wrong, I like and appreciate cool art, but I've just never been one to get super invested in a painting. I prefer when that art is in service of something else, like a fun video game, or a great story, which this was not. It is, instead, a painting that moves for about 67 minutes and then ends. If you've ever been to an art museum and stared at a single painting for 20+ minutes, this is probably the movie for you.
