Little Scene : Onibaba

When watching the opening scene of Onibaba, Kaneto Shindo’s “almost” horror and visceral fable on jealousy and death, we are introduced to the hole. A gaping natural well amongst a field of tall susuki grass in rural 14th century Japan. It’s an ominous and a masterful set up of the mystery to come and, right before the drums and horns of Hikaru Hayashi Taiko drum soundtrack blow you into another dimension, it is both unsettling and beautiful.

An unnamed woman and her daughter-in-law are surviving in a small cabin within the grass by hunting cowardly shogun who have fled the front-line of an unseen war. The pair sell the weapons and armor of the murdered to a local lecherous tradesman and dump the bodies down the dark hole in the grass as they await the return of their only son/husband from the battlefield. Their life’s everyday moments pivot on slow clothes washing and bathing directly into ravenous feasting on anything the starving pair can find, puppies included.

Yet another deserter appears. The leering Hatchi (Kei Sato) who brings news instead of their beloved’s death. As Hatchi gets closer to the lonely Daughter-in-law and a secret affair begins the Mother’s jealously unfolds and soon enough her stories of demons and devils as warnings to her companions infidelity become real enough.

Onibaba’s immediate strengths lie in its gorgeous black and white photography and in Shindo’s much visited obsessions with sexual desire, solitude and nature. The further into it we get, the more a strange sense of dread seeps through the film, especially in the final, strangely haunting “devil mask” moments.

Shindo was a long time student and admirer of Japanese cinema’s giant Kenji Mizoguchi whose perfect framing and wide to extreme close up cutting is all over Onibaba. In tern Onibaba would go on to influence many horror film makers including Guillermo Del Toro, who has sited the film as the one of the greatest psychological stories of all time and William Friedkin, who would use the film’s bizarre demon mask as the blue print for the terrifying devil visions in his seminal shocker, The Exorsist.

It was in 1960, amongst the great second wave of post war Japanese directors that Shindo would first get world-wide critical recognition with his dialogue less Naked Island and he has continued to make films to this day, but it is the strange and beautiful Onibaba that remains, undoubtedly, the director’s finest hour.