Personal Reflection on the Movie

Late August at the Hotel Ozone to me is a slow-paced movie with no actual plot. The main part of the film only portrays a daily life of these ladies and how they can survive day-by-day in the post-apocalyptic world. Many scenes in the movie are believable, especially the scenes with animals, which turn out to be real. The relationship between the girls and animals is very memorable; it is brutal, yet compassionate. They treat their horse quite harsh but they depend on their horse so much, for example the scene where the one of the girls got slap by the elder lady, then she ran to her horse as to seek comfort. In this sense we can say that the girls see their horses as their friends, which is great because they treat other animals so mercilessly like they were nothing to them. They shot the dog, gutted the cow and pulled the snake's head off so easily that I was shocked when I found out that those were real animals they used in the production.

The girls are gutting the cow

The question I have after watching this film is about human civilization. Unquestionably the old one was over; the old man got killed by the girl for a sake of the old gramophone. No one is there to appreciate the beauty of the old world anymore. However, at some point I can see that the girls are building the new one, although from a scratch. They depend on horse, learn how to survive, live with their experiment and curiosity, and they even start drawing signs on the wall just like what caveman did thousands of years ago. Even the names that are mentioned in the movie: Eva, Marie, and Barbora. All three of them are the original names from the old world. The names from the beginning of mankind and civilization. Eva refers to the first woman, while Marie is the holy name, the mother of Christian world. Barbora is a Czech version of the Greek name "Barbara", which means foreign, strange or barbaric woman. 

At the end of the movie, the elder lady and the first, and probably the last, man they have encountered died. Actually he died because of the girls, for the sake of his old gramophone. So unless they met another man, it seems like the ending of mankind is drawing nearer everyday as their journey continues. Now that they have no goals in life but to survive, they have no leader, they have no destination, the ending left us wondering what is going to happen next. I doubt this is the last group of living human but the point is these girls have to find other survivors real quick before all of them got killed by their own reckless behavior.