ONIBABA Movie Review

The Demon
The Devil Woman

A brutal parable about a mother and her daughter-in-law in war-ravaged medieval Japan who subsist by murdering stray soldiers and selling their armor. One soldier beds the daughter, setting the mother-in-law on a vengeful tirade. She dons a grisly looking samurai mask in order to scare the girl away from the soldier, but discovers to her horror that she is unable to remove it. Director Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba has a considerable cult following, and with good reason. It's a truly disturbing blend of feudal brutality and supernatural horror, photographed and directed with spellbinding intensity. The picture is really an extended ghost story but has the authentically unpleasant texture of a nightmare—Shindo is able to make the swaying of a patch of reeds seem like a harbinger of the end of the world. (Shindo's lesswell-known 1968 Kuroneko is a horror film that's every bit as creepy as Onibaba, but even more erotic and perverse.) Onibaba’s widescreen black-and-white images are best seen in a letterboxed version.

NEXT STOP … Kuroneko, Kwaidan, Carnival of Souls

1964 103m/B JP Nobuko Otowa, Yitsuko Yoshimura, Kei Sato; D: Kaneto Shindo. VHS HMV, CVC, TPV