Critics reviews

Shindo’s film is a chilling horror folktale of how desperation, sexual guilt, and hatred can twist people into the worst versions of themselves. With cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda’s beautifully evocative shots of windswept marshes swaying ominously in the breeze coupled with a thunderous and frenzied score by Hikaru Hayashi, Onibaba isn’t just an excellent spooky movie — it’s an absolute feast for the senses.

Tales of the spirit world figure prominently in a number of the titles in BAM’s series, which includes two of the greatest horror films ever made, anywhere: director Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). Violent, beautiful, supernaturally inflected medieval stories of female revenge, the pair could be seen as companion pieces.

Shindo, one of the Japanese cinema's foremost leftists, had already made one parable of the new consumerism in 1961's The Naked Island; here, he relishes doing something bolder and more cinematic still, its wild streaks of nudity, violence and outright horror ironically transforming what must originally have been meant as cautionary tale (or legend) into a flagrantly commercial proposition.

Here, Shindō moulds a childhood Buddhist fable warning against duplicity for his own means. In Onibaba, truthfulness is about finding the limits of your own freedom in an unfathomable moral sea.

Shindo's transformation of the tale into an erotic noir tale of psychological horror is brilliantly subversive, and yet in its way intuitive and faithful. His secularised version preserves the fear while removing Buddha; there is no God up there in the vast endless sky above this wasteland, but Buddha's ferocious vengefulness, the cause-and-effect pattern of crime and punishment is transferred to the arena of paranoid human wrongdoing: and in fact Shindo does appear to strike a supernatural chord in the movie's final movement.

There is no mistaking the film's anti-war message, but peer a little closer through the tall susuki grasses, in which the three main characters darkly conduct their business and pleasure, and you may also notice an altogether different kind of allegory. The vast, gaping pit at the centre of the story, fed by the strong and devouring the weak, serves as a metaphor for the insatiable hunger that drives capitalism.

Many of the actions in the film are horrifying and despicable, but few are beyond comprehension, because Shindô registers his characters' needs so clearly and urgently. Though the black-and-white Cinemascope photography contributes to the unsettling atmosphere, the true horror arises from behavior that seems inhuman, yet is framed as all too human. Through this distorted lens, Shindô re-imagines a famous Buddhist legend as a chilling parable on the ravages of war.

No masterpiece by any means, it's at times overplayed, but it's striking visually, handling swift horizontal movement - and using the claustrophobic body-high reeds among which the women live - very well. It's also genuinely erotic, and the treatment in detail of the women's lives as essentially bestial is interesting so long as Shindo stops short of portentous allegorising about the human condition.

The director's brooding tale is abetted by Hiyomi Kuroda's cloudy, low-key photography and Hikaru Kuroda's properly weird background musical score. But despite Mr. Shindo's obvious striving for elemental, timeless drama, it is simply sex that is the most impressive of the hungers depicted here.