The film, on the surface, appears to be an ordinary Good and Evil story, and that's how it actually ends. However, if you think about it a step further, you can see that the boundary between sinners and non-sinners in this film is blurred. Also, looking at the symbols that the movie constantly provides as hints, pictures of "sheep hanging on the tree". It makes you question whether the person who fell off the cliff died because he was a real sinner or was simply a scapegoat who was pushed off the cliff.

And the answer to that question is in the movie. The god "Nororo" in the movie is not a good god who punishes evil. He is just an evil god who eats the scapegoat thrown by the villagers. The director has already hinted that the character thrown into the sea is close to the scapegoat.

In conclusion, this film is about the scapegoat mechanism. And it send the message in a way that deceives the audience. Just as the real society falls into the illusion that the problem has been solved by executing the scapegoat, it makes the audience to experience the same illusion by allowing the most suspicious person to be executed. I don't know if this is the director's intention, but at least it is the interpretation of the symbols in the movie.

I think it's a great movie that tricks the audience nicely by hiding this theme in the cliché, so it's appropriate to give it a full score.

In order to both lighten the prison budget and bolster dwindling rural populations, six convicts are paroled to the tiny seaside village of Uobuka in the hopes that they will fit in and settle down. A nondescript little fishing community, Uobuka boasts an annual festival meant to appease the town's guardian spirit, Nororo, a fishy aquatic demon immortalized by a giant cast iron statue situated on a nearby hilltop. But the town's sleepy equilibrium is thrown out of balance when a murdered body is discovered and it's going to take drastic measures to set things right-for Nororo is plenty pissed. A better editor could have given Daihachi Yoshida's cheeky amalgam of superstition and social satire a much needed tightening, but the end result is still a highly watchable drama with a few laughs and a whiff of magic. It's sacrificial lamb served up with a side of ramen and just the slightest of nods to Fellini's "La Dolce Vita".

The story is quite promising but the executing of the movie did not deliver the suspense or black comedy. Six ex-convicts were re-settled in a Japanese coastal town where only a few people in the town knew about their past. The movie moved along slowly and could not build up the suspense. The characters of the six ex-convicts were also not fully developed.

When people started dying in the town, the identity of the killer quickly became quite clear to the audience, leading to an absence of suspense. But some of the actions of the killer, such as trying to strangle his girlfriend, are not clearly explained. Furthermore, the ending was somewhat predictable.

Lastly, there is hardly any connection between the movie title and the plot.