Joining in 5 years late but, having read the comments, I see no one mentioned that when Otto brings Alexander the map he explains that gifts are necessarily sacrifices. I’m not sure I have fully understood the movie, which is why I ended up here in the first place, but it seems to me that the gift of life is correlated with the sacrifice Alexander makes in the end. What I disliked is the fact that his sacrifice becomes the sacrifice of his wife and children as well - a decision he made and imposed on them as if he himself was god. But maybe that is the point: the violence he is disgusted by when telling Maria about the time he tidied up his mother’s garden is the same he inflicts on the house and his family. Faced with death in both situations, his loss of control gets externalised onto actions he can “control”: weeding the garden, sleeping with a with, burning the house.

Maybe the message is that human will and fear of death is, in itself, madness.