Charisma is the name of a skinny, not-very-tall, rather homely tree in the middle of a vast forest in Japan. It has a few constellations of branches flecked with a handful of drying-up leaves. Circling its base is a continually widening corona of nothingness. Charisma’s roots emit a toxin that’s slowly killing all the plants and fellow trees in its orbit. Puzzlingly, all the growth Charisma eventually kills spend their final hours inching closer to their murderer, as if they’d been drugged into obedience.

Charisma is also the name of writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first movie of 1999. It wonders, with philosophical weightiness, whether it’s more moral for human interlopers to axe the deadly tree down in order to save the forest it seems destined to annihilate or to let it continue spreading its poison, too special — even if that specialness comes at a cost — to thwart. It would, of course, be ideal to find a happy medium — perhaps narrow down a way to replant Charisma in a place where its presence won’t be so cataclysmic so that the autumnal woodlands it lives in can go back to thriving — but Kurosawa, a director known for his hair-raisingly quiet and still horror movies, finds a way to avoid anything resembling clear answers, let alone maintain a discernible narrative. 

Kurosawa makes this obliquely heady movie, a probable metaphor for the individualist-collectivist tug-of-war in his native Japan, as unsettling and unpindownable as possible, unfurling in what seems like a quasi-dream state whose histories are murky and which seems to have its own temporal rules. (When characters travel around in cars, windshield reflections always seem to move at a narcotic half speed.)

Kurosawa’s protagonist is a hostage negotiator named Yabuike (Kōji Yakusho). He’s sacked by the police station he works for after disastrously acting indecisively during a high-pressure moment with a parliament member held at gunpoint. (“I wanted to help them both,” he tells a superior with a sad shrug.) But even the onetime straightforward-seeming character, who’s for vague reasons dropped off in the forest in which Charisma resides early on and gets in the middle of some warring over the parasitic tree’s fate, gets hazier as the film goes along. The main setting’s geography is labyrinthine; its endless swathe of trees — some of which carry the slowly decaying bodies of despairing men and women who have hanged themselves — is revealed to contain within its acres an abandoned, damp sanatorium abounding in forgotten worlds of its own.

Abetted by a mischievous score that feels like a car trying to run you off the road with the help of a gun propped out of a cracked window, Charisma’s willful slitheriness is less frustrating than it is successful at making things feel increasingly nightmarish. Can the damage this tree is responsible for be as easily stopped as it initially seems like it could be? “The forces of life and destruction … aren’t they the same thing?” one character wonders inconclusively. Kurosawa impressively never comes close to message-movie overtness, keeping everything at a dark-fairy-tale tenor.