Review of Aura: Koga Maryuin's Last War

I knew going into this that the movie was primarily about bullying, but it ended up being even more depressing than I expected. A Silent Voice did a great job of building that theme into a rich and well-developed story. Aura, unfortunately, just spends most of its short run-time beating us over the head with one miserable act of bullying after another. Every time I thought the story had hit its low point and was about to move forward, it just kept coming in with one low blow after another. When it did eventually move on to the climax, the resolution wasn't as cathartic asit could have been, and left some conflicts unresolved by the time the credits rolled. This was amended somewhat by mid-credits and post-credits epilogue scenes, but these flip-flop the ending back and forth to the point where it gets its messages muddled. It almost feels like it gave us the endings from two or three conflicting routes of a game, and consequently I have no idea what point it was actually trying to make.