Just skip through the dull parts.
To save you skipping back if you missed something, here’s the plot:
Girl’s mother dies. Stepfather reads will, finds out inheritance left to two daughters, not him. Gets drunk, tries to kill the girls. Protagonist tries to shoot stepfather, kills her sister instead. Stepfather has her committed, pays warden to have her lobotomized in five days.
At the end of five days, girl is lobotomized. She escapes into a fantasy world and lives life as a semi-vegetable.
OR
At the end of five days, girl is lobotomized. She later escapes the prison anyway, meeting the person who’s been helping her in her imagination. (Unlikely but possible.) Her imaginative training was to teach her brain to overcome the trauma of lobotomy.
Inbetween her committal and lobotomy, she stages escape attempt(s) and resists an attempted rape by the warden. Her escape attempt is unsuccessful because she sacrifices herself to help her friend, who has a family, escape. Two other conspirators also apparently die.
Her activities in the insane asylum are interpreted through two layers of imaginary worlds. We are not always shown the real-world version, but must guess from the imaginary layers what is happening. In the first layer, she is in a brothel rather than an insane asylum. In the second layer, she is in various sci-fi/samurai/WWII/fantasy settings instead of a brothel.
So it’s the layered realities concept, like Matrix and Inception.
Pretty enjoyable action sequences and message, like I said. Emphasis on the idea that we have all the tools for psychological resistance within ourselves. Freedom comes from within. I agree.
Just skip the dull melodrama bits and shabby “acting”. And enjoy scantily clad hot girls kicking ass in a way that doesn’t stink of feminism because it all occurs in imaginary worlds and doesn’t represent a claim that women can actually out-fight men… or robots, or titanic samurai-demons, or dragon-led orc-hordes, or zombie nazis, etc.
Cheesiest moment in the movie (that I didn’t skip): sensei in the giant Zen temple is white. Lol-Tarantino.
Note – I watched this movie due to its persistently high ranking on letmewatchthis.com’s “most popular” rankings. I was not disappointed. Good job internets.
Personally I think the girl was lobotomized and lived as a semi-vegetable. The old white dude helping her in her imagination and driving the bus at the end was her angel. Her “deep sacrifice” was to help her friend escape instead of her, because her friend had a family. So she had to suffer the “deep sacrifice” of the lobotomy. But in doing so, thanks to her imaginative training she was able to escape into her own mental world with the angel.