A film about a love affair between a widower and a married woman leads us to expect a bittersweet or tragic romance. Director Linton Semage may not actually stray from this typical plot in The Outcast, however it turns out that this is not the director′s main interest either. Rather he wishes to explore human desire and its petty nature, and the unhappiness derived from conflict between the individual and the collective. Set in a small village in Sri Lanka, a floodgate keeper named Dharmadasa falls in love with the young wife of a soldier. Their affair becomes the talk of the village but Dharmadasa′s response is far from that of humiliation. He ignores the villagers′ words and closes the floodgate. He eventually commits suicide after realizing that it was his stubbornness that caused the death of his own son, a tragedy perhaps caused by Dharmadasa blocking the dispensation of the water. Regardless of Dharmadasa′s death, the sun sets magnificently in the horizon and the water flows calmly, recalling the words that Dharmadasa′s father relates to his grandson: "Man may lose his patience with nature, yet nature is patient with man." (Kim Ji-Seok)