EMPIRE OF PASSION

In feudal Japan, a young soldier begins an intense affair with an older married woman. Driven by passion, obsession, and jealousy, they decide to murder her husband. But when the husband returns from the dead, the couple is pushed deep into the dark realms of insanity.

Nagisa Ôshima’s turn-of-the-century drama explores the slow and creeping breakdown of a relationship. Inverting the gender dynamics of his earlier film In the Realm of the Senses, this lusciously dark, erotic tale of a tainted love affair precisely dissects the torrid nature of a “crime of passion.”