Saibi is a movie about how horrible life can be and how horrible some people can become. It focuses heavily on the ideas of right and wrong and how far you would go to represent your opinions. Would you even destroy happiness of others to do so? The story takes place in a poor village in South Korean. In this village is a small Christian church which a lot of the villagers visit, to pray and hope for a better afterlife. You as the audience focus the conflict between the main protagonist and this church. The main protagonist is for me the most unlikeable characterof all. He is an aggressive alcoholic who beats up his daughter and his wife as often as he can while insulting everyone who he is speaking to. The movie sadly doesn’t go into any detail why he ends up being such an asshole, it gives you hardly any background information to any of the characters overall.

Saibi is a very depressing movie. It won’t give any happy moments or a fulfilling feeling. The characters that you root for won’t get their happy ending.

I am not the biggest fan of letting my cheers for the likeable characters getting crushed but this movie creates such a big impact because it is just like a very sad story about the real life and I guess that’s the movies biggest advantage… its proximity to reality. Of course there are some scenes where you ask yourselfe “what?”, or “how?”, but basically the movie resembles a shitty life in some poor south Korean village, as close as you can imagine it. (as a person not living there and only hearing stories)

The reason I gave this movie a 7 was because I didn’t enjoy this movie that much. It has a very slow start and the first half was for me rather boring. I first really started to like this movie after the ending, when I looked back at it and put aside all my subjective feelings about what I wanted to see and how the movie should have been.

The artstyle is probably the point why I thought this movie was boring. In such a depressing reality near movie it is very important to have an atmosphere to engage the audience to the story. The Soundtrack was fine and accomplished that, but the visuals just kept pushing you away from the atmosphere with its shitty cgi looks. I have to say that I have seen worse cgi in anime, but I just can repeat myself by saying that cgi in anime looks just terrible nearly every time.

So overall Saibi is a very depressive movie and definitely not for people who like happy endings. It has a sad atmosphere to it which sadly cannot grip you that much because of its terrible visuals. But despite all its flaws Saibi will definitely be a movie you won’t forget so quickly after finishing it.