It’s easy to see why Akira Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths, adapted from the play by Maxim Gorky, may have been passed over. As a stage adaptation, it’s, well, stagy, and the story is so forcefully, unrelentingly bleak that it practically dares you to look away. The audience’s reaction to will very much depend on how inclined they are to get on that wavelength.

Personally, I think I was able to simply appreciate it more than anything else. Kurosawa directs and composes the movie with creativity and wit, but stage-to-screen translations always feel a bit too boxed-in for me. And the inherent theatricality of the stage is at odds with the grit and realism that such social issue stories—which aim to push the bleak underbelly into full view—must naturally rely on. Even Kurosawa couldn’t overcome that for me.

But if it’s easy to see why it was passed over, it’s also easy to see why it’s developed a following among a subset of Kurosawa fans. Gorky’s fatalism, with its dedicated absence of subtlety, certainly carries a mesmerizing power. And Kurosawa’s staging of the play is, if nothing else, an acting powerhouse. There’s Toshiro Mifune, yes, but it’s Bokuzen Hidari (aka Farmer Yohei from Seven Samurai) who steals the show as a traveler who provides a momentary, necessary breath of hope.

I ultimately found it more of a curio than a lost masterpiece, but with plenty of virtues and strengths for the Kurosawa inclined. At very least, in the context of his catalog, it stands as a testament to the sheer range of arguably the greatest filmmaker in the history of cinema.

7 out of 10