Onibaba

“Evil is the heart when wars, tragedy, death, sweep away the civilized veneer and reveal the primitive beneath”

“Demon Woman”, as it is translated in the opening subtitles, is exclusively concerned with murder, sex and mayhem in medieval Japan. A young woman (Jitsuko Yoshimura) and her mother-in-law (Nobuko Otowa) make their living during the warring states period by killing travelers, stripping them of their clothes and dumping them down a deep, dark hole, and then selling the spoils to a local merchant in exchange for millet. After local fisherman Hachi (Kei Sato) returns from the war in Kyoto and tells the older woman that her son is dead, he strikes up an erotic friendship with the younger woman. The mother-in-law hungers for sex herself, but after being refused by Hachi assumes a moral tone against the young couple’s bourgeoning sexual relationship, even as she continues her practice of murdering traveling samurai and shoving them into her own private gehenna-in-the-grass. She is aided in her efforts by the mask she tears from the dead face of one of her victims, and the ensuing terror she inflicts on her daughter-in-law is offset for the audience only slightly by dramatic irony before the entire movie turns into a parable concerning the relationship between men, women and the myths we’ve made to help us govern right conduct. So the above quotation (from the original English language poster for the film) has it only half right: the movie isn’t so much about ‘the primitive’ as it is the permanence of that ‘civilized veneer’, even during the very worst of times. It’s a tale about what happens when we fail to let our own best stories lead us along the shining path of the Buddha, and where that failure leads.