“Angel’s Egg” (part 2)

As they sit by the immense row of flasks that Mindy just added to, a rain starts falling. The two of them watch the rain through an opening in the cave ceiling far ahead, the droplets coming down the shaft and filling the bone-covered ponds down below. They keep watching. This continues for some time. Then Boi starts reciting Genesis 6:7-8:8, the story of Noah and the flood. Well, most of it at least. He leaves out a lot of verses that just pertain to logistical details and background information. As he speaks of how all the beasts of the earth, of all sizes, died in the flood, the camera slowly pans over the landscape of skeletons and fossils all around and below them. The implications are self-explanatory.

Then, finally, he gets to the part about the dove. Noah sent the dove out from the ark to search for land, and the dove came back with nothing to show for it. He tried again later, with the same result. Seven days after that, he tried again. This time, the dove simply never came back.

Maybe it found land but didn't feel like returning. Maybe it lost its way back to the ark and eventually fell to the sea and died of exhaustion and hunger, its skeleton joining all the others at the bottom deep below. Maybe something else. Noah and his family waited for the bird to return. It never did. They lost hope. Eventually, they started to doubt that they had ever sent a bird at all. That there had ever been a bird. That there had ever been such a thing as dry land. That there had ever been anything but a single, crowded, stinking ship lost on an eternal sea. That became their entire world, and they forgot anything and everything else.

...

Hmm. Starting to mix the religious metaphors here. I guess this could be reinterpreting the Noah story as a prophetic allegory about the fall of man and eventual coming of Jesus. Maybe. The surface level reading would be that Mindy is the dove and Boi is Noah/humanity, but that cross he's been carrying and his general vibe are both much more Jesus. Of course, if he's the christ, then Mindy would have to be humanity, so...like I said, mixed metaphors. I think I'll have to see more of the film before I can puzzle this out.

...

He finishes his monologue by saying that he doesn't remember where he saw the bird, the egg, and the tree. Maybe it was just a dream. Maybe he just convinced himself that he dreamed it. Maybe everything is a dream, and all of them - himself, Mindy, and the shadow fish - are just figments of the mind of someone else. And maybe even that person is only a ghost and some old dreams now.

Again, not sure how to read this. I feel like I might have to be familiar with some specific threads of Christian mysticism that I'm not familiar with in order to interpret it correctly.

...also, he curiously doesn't mention the fishermen at all. Only the two of them and the fish. Even though the fishermen seemed to be much more tangible and "real" than the umbral coelacanths. Weird.

They sit silently after he finishes his story. The rain comes down harder and louder through the opening in the cavern ceiling, the context of the Noah story giving the downpour a more ominous framing. Mindy starts slouching forward over her egg. The rain gets harder still. This continues for some time. Then, abruptly, she tells him that she knows where the bird is, and she'll show it to him. He tells her that he already knew that she knew, and was just trying to persuade her to bring him to it. So, she gets to her feet and starts leading him through the winding passages and up additional flights of stairs.

She may or may not have been lying when she said that it wasn't her who's been leaving all these flasks here. She definitely seems to know more about this place than she's been letting on.

As the rain patters hard off of the stone, she leads him onward and upward, until they reach their destination and his eyes widened. An incredibly melodramatic choral piece strikes up as the camera cuts to the cave wall and slowly pans down to reveal something embedded in the rock.

Mindy explains that this is the bird. That looks more like some kind of horrifying harpy-creature to me, but then again the first representation we saw of the bird/egg was the giant statue-covered spaceship sphere, so if that thing can be a bird than this creature easily can.

As the chanting slowly abates, Mindy explains that when she found the dove's skeleton, it had already fossilized and fused into the cave wall. However, she managed to extract an unfossilised egg from it, and she's been brooding and hoping to hatch it ever since.

She doesn't say what's up with the water bottles that she's partially or wholly responsible for arranging outside the fossil's nook. Maybe trying to hydrate the fossil back to life is another side project she's been working on in the meantime.

Boi replies, once again, that he thought this might be the case. He hadn't known, but he'd strongly suspected. Good for him I guess.

External shot. The rain continues to pour down. We get a look at the object that Mindy was running away from with the egg at the beginning. As I now understand, this isn't the same landscape at all as the one we saw the tree and egg-ship in in the prologue (indeed, that was likely a different world altogether; the outside rather than inside of the dream. Hence why it was day there, but only ever night in here). And, with the recently provided context, the structure she came out of looks a lot like a grounded ship. A thick-hulled, rounded ship, like how Noah's Ark is often depicted.

So, she came from the ark. How much time is supposed to have passed between then and now? Has she been returning there to rest with her egg every so often, or did she only ever leave it once? I suspect the former, since she already had the egg with her when we saw her waking up before, and she supposedly found it in the cave, so. We then cut to Mindy and Boi sitting around a campfire. They don't appear to be in the same place where they were before, but it's also full of bottles. Did they return to Mindy's ark thing? Maybe.

Anyway, after the obligatory twenty seconds of brooding silence, Boi notices that Mindy seems to be making a point of putting her ear to the egg as she cradles it. He asks her if she hears anything, and after a moment she claims that yes, she hears it breathing. He assures her that that's not how eggs work, and so that must be her own breathing reverberating back through the eggshell.

She then says she can hear wings flapping, which must mean it's dreaming about flying.

Boi tells her that she must be hearing the rising and falling of the wind outside, because that isn't how dreams work. Hmm, he could be wrong in this case. If this world is actually the dream of the fetus in the egg, and she is the fetus holding a representative microcosm of herself, then, well. Any sound coming from the world around them is, in fact, the dreams of the thing in the egg. And she's its avatar, so of course she has some self awareness about this.

Granted, now it seems like Boi is the one who doesn't understand what's going on and needs to be shown the way. I guess he might just be doing a bit to help her make progress toward awakening. This expression he gives her definitely gives me that vibe:

Very purposeful, deliberately neutral, with some barely suppressed frustration bleeding through.

Mindy isn't looking at him, though, so she doesn't see it. She just keeps cradling the egg, assuring it that it will only need to dream a little bit longer, soon it will be ready to hatch. For now, it just needs to stay here in her arms, where there's no rain and no cold. Boi's frustrated expression intensifies.

The rain intensifies even more. The canals built around the city they passed through earlier begin to flood. Mindy has fallen asleep, and Boi carries her and her egg...somewhere.

Oh...back to bed, it looks like. Yes, that's the same bed she woke up from before. So he did bring her back "home."

...the sun was just setting as she got out of bed, before. Which was in this world, not the one with the tree and the virus eyeball egg spaceship. Assuming the two actually are different, of course. Anyway, that means that there IS day and night here. It's just that night either lasts really, really long, or their journey through the wilderness, city, and mountain caves was a lot shorter than it looked. Okay then.

He puts her to bed with his stigmata'd hands. Before he can disengage, she wakes up and grabs onto his shirt, keeping him by her side.

She asks him who he is. He's silent for a long time, as is the local custom. Then, instead of answering, he just asks her who SHE is. Same response. He leans a little further over, embracing her protectively, like a father and daughter. She hugs him back, still protecting the egg. This continues for some time.

We then cut back to the city, where a lifeblood cocoon's glow gives it away from inside a lamp casing. Slashing it open should give you two or three temporary extra masks.

Spooky music plays as the flooding canals and pouring rain begins to flood the streets. Maybe now the shadow fish will have a more comfortable environment.


I'll split it here. Short post, I know, but I think you can understand why this might be a slow, energy-intensive watch. Looks like Angel's Egg will be a four parter.