Survive Style 5+

Jung called transformation a death and rebirth of the personality, and insisted that the old identity must actually die for the new one to be born. The psyche resists this constantly. It clings to the outworn self, and the clinging is what generates the symptom.

Every story here is that refusal literalized. The husband who cannot kill his wife for good is a man unable to end a relationship that is already dead, so it keeps reanimating, more monstrous each time it returns, exactly as repressed material does. The father hypnotized into believing he is a bird cannot be brought back because the family keeps failing to complete the ritual that would return him, a self stuck mid-transformation with no one able to finish the rite. The ad-woman lives so fully inside her invented images that she has replaced her actual self with a persona, the Jungian mask worn so long the face beneath forgets it exists. The hitman's relentless question, "What is your function," is the individuation question stated flat: what are you actually for, underneath the role. He dies without an answer, which is Sekiguchi's warning about the cost of never asking it in time.

Buddhism teaches that clinging is the engine of suffering, and that what we cannot release simply cycles back, life after life, in the turning of samsara. The undead wife is this doctrine made visible and comic. She dies and returns, dies and returns, because the marriage is a knot of grasping neither partner will untie.

Watch how her resurrections escalate. Each time the husband buries her, she comes back stronger, more furious, more physically impossible, until she is flinging him across rooms. This is precisely how avoided suffering behaves: suppress it and it does not dissolve, it compounds, returning with interest. The only release in the film comes when things are finally allowed to end, when a self is at last permitted to complete its death instead of being dragged back for another round. The burglars, the hitman, the bird-father, the ad-woman, the murderous couple, all are on the same wheel, all grasping at a form that wants to pass. Sekiguchi's cartoon violence is the wheel of samsara spun so fast it looks like slapstick.