‘I’m not a demon! I’m a human being!‘
I’ve watched a fair bit of Japanese cinema now, so I thought I knew what to expect from Onibaba. Mediative pacing. Thoughtful dialogue. Aesthetic beauty. What I didn’t reckon with is that much of my experience comes from the films of Kurosawa – prestige cinema. Onibaba is a different prospect entirely…
An old woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) make a living murdering passing Samurai and stealing anything valuable they happen to have about their person. In time, the daughter-in-law (never named in the movie) falls for a local soldier who has abandoned the war. Meanwhile, a mysterious masked samurai begins to appear in the fields.
Onibaba is perhaps most famous for the iconic mask sported by the ghostly samurai. It should be noted, however, that this haunting visage doesn’t appear at all until well into the second half of the movie. Indeed, Onibaba is unnerving, but only occasionally does it stray into full-blown horror, despite its reputation as a key text of the J-horror movement that culminated with Ringu and The Grudge. For much of its nearly two-hour run time, Onibaba is a character study about abandonment and growing old. Whilst it does have some things in common with the work of the aforementioned Japanese masters, namely the chiaroscuro lighting and the beauty of many of the shots, Onibaba feels ahead of its time in terms of its themes and content. By regularly meandering into topics such as sex and religion, Kaneto Shindô’s film retains a freshness and universality perhaps absent from other Japanese films of this era.
While this is undoubtedly a film for horror completists only, it also isn’t the drag that I expected it to be. I was never bored and from an old Japanese movie from the ’60s, that’s about as much as I can ask.