Onibaba

 "The Hole/ Deep and dark/ Its darkness has lasted since ancient times"

 Say the stately kanji superimposed over an open pit in the middle of a wind-stirred field of tall grass. Then the title comes on to cymbals and a discordant note, followed by a vigorous, jazzy theme.

 I've been meaning to watch Onibaba's for ages, as I like these old Japanese folk-drenched stories; but that's not quite what writer/director Kaneto Shindō had in mind; The film's a deeply fucked up but unjudgmental psychodrama about civilians caught up in other people's wars.

 It centres on two women - one middle-aged, with wild hair (Nobuko Otowa), and the other her young stepdaughter (Jitsuko Yoshimura). They're introduced ruthlessly murdering two fleeing soldiers -got to love that stark shot of blood splashing on the susuki grass- then stripping them and throwing the naked bodies into the pit. Later, they take the soldiers' arms and armour down to a local broker who'll sell the items back to the one warring army or the other; he pays them with a couple bags of millet, which the women take back to their hut. There's a nest of crows on their roof. How's that for symbolism?

 Kiyomi Kuroda's gorgeous black and white photography manages a lot of very striking images, with a lot of focus on the women's very expressive eyes.

 I guess it's a living. Barely. Hey, I'm not going to judge- I've seen enough samurai movies to know the effects of their wars on the peasantry. The film, luckily, underlines this; While the action never leaves this one field, the news from abroad are dire - Kyoto has fallen, and armies rove the land, killing and raping and taking, as armies do. The way it's described is near apocalyptic: "As if the earth had turned upside down." 

 Complications arrive when their neighbour Hachi (Kei Satō), who had been conscripted along with the young woman's husband, returns from the front lines a deserter. He brings bad news: the husband was killed by a mob when they tried to rob a farm. Later, he gleefully describes how he killed an enemy soldier while he was taking a shit in the bushes. This movie is bleak.

 In any case, Hachi soon starts sultrily coming on to the young woman. And despite him... well, being a complete dipshit who vents his sexual frustrations by screaming and running around in the fields like a lunatic, I guess he's the only man available so they quickly start boning. For a while I got worried the movie was going to go down a different path there.

Hachi piles on the charm.

 The older woman doesn't take it well - not because her stepdaughter is sleeping with a ne'er do well who lived while her son died, though she absolutely plays that card - but because she's worried that the girl will leave her for Hachi, and she needs the help to continue their line of work. And because she's also horny as fuck, and when she offers herself Hachi coldly turns her down; Brutal.

 And that's the main conflict here. A very (very) slight, but pretty cool supernatural element is introduced later, and steers the film towards its very cool, folk-horror-ish final destination.

 It's a simple, primal story set in a sort of amoral limbo bounded by the whispering, constantly shifting susuki grass. It's aged beautifully; I can see why so many consider it a classic.