Critics reviews

Though we find in Imamura's film an emotional and psychological complexity that risks repelling viewers with as much force as they might experience from a blood-and-gore thriller, there is a humanity here that is captivating.

Vengeance Is Mine is so unkempt that—like its director—it resists easy classification right through to its smirkingly funny finale, which taunts the expectation that human action can be fully understood or resolved. This might be Imamura's most "difficult" film, which makes it the perfect place to start.

As Touch of Evil is to classical film noir, so Vengeance Is Mine is to the Japanese New Wave. Each film retrospectively serves as the apotheosis for the style or movement, encapsulating many of the aims and concerns of films from the previous two decades into a singular, reflexive work.

Imamura belongs on the shelf with Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, Fuller, Douglas Sirk, and Claude Chabrol, labeled "Sardonic Objectivists." Vengeance Is Mine, typically, wastes no breath on compassion, no calories on decorousness, and no time on explanations.

What is so disquieting, unnerving, even distasteful about Vengeance Is Mine is that, in closely following Enokizu's murder-spree, in its refusal to offer simple explanations or moral judgments on what is depicted onscreen, and through its frequent use of black humor, the film seems largely to sympathize with the sociopathic killer...

We're finally left wondering: is anyone here not in pain, not living a lie? Are compromise, oppression, madness, violence and a death wish par for the Japanese course? At once darkly comic and quasi-tragic, Imamura's often brilliant tale of Eros and Thanatos is perverse, powerful and subversive.

Combining the naturalistic, frenetic elements of documentary filmmaking with the stylization of elliptical narrative, Imamura creates a chaotic and fragmented portrait of a serial killer: the disorganized and awkward execution of the murders; the achronologic temporal leaps in the narrative structure; the rapid, cinéma vérité styled camerawork as Enokizu checks into the inn. In essence, the disjointed appearance of the film reflects the underlying dark soul of the inscrutable and amoral Enoziku.

Over the years the cinema has given us any number of tales of the criminal underworld, and explorations of the mindsets of murderers. Yet for all that's come before there's been nothing quite like Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine... [The film] has no wish to make sense of a "senseless crime," it only wants to make "senselessness" palpable. And that it does—to devastating effect.

I have never seen such intimate sex act more naturally rendered or revealing of the psyches within the body-play. It takes an iron will and a major artistic vision to hurtle through so many options and still retain a rich thematic coherence. Vengeance is Mine demands much—I'd almost call it courage—for the viewer to stay astride this tiger Imamura has unleashed.

Imamura's detached, almost scientific style forestalls any pat sympathy for the central character—he is not a sentimental "victim of society," but the embodiment of its darkest Darwinian forces. Imamura implies that his real tragedy lies in not being able to go far enough.