I got halfway through that there wasn't likely to be a "resolution" per se, but it didn't annoy me; that's hard to do.
Yes: I love that we never even learn if the local explanation is the correct one or if it's just the one that makes the most sense to the people who have to inhabit a region where this thing happens. And I believe that Antarès does the right thing at the end, ritually, with the four sheep that are both the scapegoats according to village tradition and the body-bag stand-ins that will give the families something to bury (making himself the scapegoat, too, taking responsibility for friendly fire that never happened, metonymically for his failure to protect his men and his even worse sin of having to leave them behind; I think he is trying to go after them when he takes the sleeping pills and lies down on the valley ground, but that would be a different story, a more familiar and a more reassuring one; if there is katabasis here, it's one-way), but it's the kind of ritual right thing that has no perceivable effect in this world, because that's not how this particular covenant works. "What happens then?"–"You are forgiven."–"Is that all?" You could actually double-feature it with Wrona's Demon, not just because of the disappearing, but because it shares that sense of fragments that should fit together into some finally comprehensible whole and never do. The story of the "people of the cave" rhymes with the missing men and the dog; it does not explain.
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Yes: I love that we never even learn if the local explanation is the correct one or if it's just the one that makes the most sense to the people who have to inhabit a region where this thing happens. And I believe that Antarès does the right thing at the end, ritually, with the four sheep that are both the scapegoats according to village tradition and the body-bag stand-ins that will give the families something to bury (making himself the scapegoat, too, taking responsibility for friendly fire that never happened, metonymically for his failure to protect his men and his even worse sin of having to leave them behind; I think he is trying to go after them when he takes the sleeping pills and lies down on the valley ground, but that would be a different story, a more familiar and a more reassuring one; if there is katabasis here, it's one-way), but it's the kind of ritual right thing that has no perceivable effect in this world, because that's not how this particular covenant works. "What happens then?"–"You are forgiven."–"Is that all?" You could actually double-feature it with Wrona's Demon, not just because of the disappearing, but because it shares that sense of fragments that should fit together into some finally comprehensible whole and never do. The story of the "people of the cave" rhymes with the missing men and the dog; it does not explain.