The Chicken is a well-made short that is a bit of an unsolved mystery as you have to keep working after it's over to make sense of what you just saw. I felt it ended just as I was being drawn in.

The story revolves around two Japanese men in New York City--Hiro and his cousin/house guest, Kei. Hiro is a scrawny, low-maintenance fellow who has a delusion he and his family will one day survive as subsistence farmers in Siberia. He brings home a live chicken one night for dinner so he can practice the survival skills he plans to pass on to his unborn child. After seeing a man apparently die in the street earlier that day, Hiro loses his resolve and can't bring himself to slaughter the chicken. He relies on his pregnant wife, Anna, to do this dirty work for him. During dinner, which Hiro doesn't eat, Anna's water breaks and they hurry to the hospital, leaving Kei to clean up the mess... Then it ends.

In a short film, nothing is superfluous, so one has to tease the meaning out of these events. Water and blood seem to be thematic elements. As Hiro and Kei wait for the ambulance to come for the sick man, they try to give him water, but the water just spews out of his mouth, as if the man's life is flowing out of him. This seems to disturb Hiro, implying this soft man had never needed to contemplate the harshness of life and death. That night, when Anna has to slaughter the chicken for him, we see her holding it between her legs as it bleeds out, giving the appearance blood is spouting out of her vagina. Shortly after, her water breaks, and as Kei is cleaning it off the floor, he notices blood mixed in. It is unclear whether this is the chicken's blood that had inadvertently been missed, or if it came from Anna. I took this to mean they lost their child.

Of course with any film that is intentionally ambiguous, more meaning can be wrung out of it.