Shura (1971) aka Demons

Toshio Matsumoto's second feature, Demons, begins like a rather typical historical drama. A destitute samurai living under the pseudonym Gengo is trying to raise the money necessary to join a gang of samurai planning to avenge their slain lord. (The avengers are actually the famed forty-seven ronin of Japanese folklore.) However, he is also madly in love with the geisha Koman, and against his servant's wishes, uses the 100 ryo raised for him by his family to join the avengers to pay off Koman's debts. It turns out, though, that Koman is already married, and she and her husband plotted an elaborate scheme to swindle Gengo out of his money. Furious, Gengo vows revenge, and soon all are plunged into an eternal hellish night from which none of them can hope, or expect to wake. Matsumoto's film is an all-out full-frontal assault on traditional Japanese values, and the code of the samurai. He goes further in his condemnation of the Japanese psyche than even Kobayashi dared in Harakiri and Samurai Rebellion. Fans of Japanese cinema will also notice that Demons shares some similar qualities with Yotsuya Kaidan (the subject of several film adaptations, the most famous by Kinoshita in 1949, and by Nakagawa in 1959), and this is not coincidental, Demons is an adaptation of Tsuruya Nanboku and Shuji Ishizawa's kabuki play of the same name, and Nanboku also wrote Yotsuya Kaidan. While the horror in Demons is one of a purely human nature, the same suffocating sense of terror and despair is on display here, and it is only heightened by Matsumoto's direction, which is nothing short of perfection. His use of claustrophobic cinematic spaces, lucid chiaroscuro photography, repetition of events as seen by different points-of-view places Demons firmly in the realm of the cinematic, and avoids the mortal sin of just being a filmed play. Like many of the great nuberu bagu directors, Matsumoto lived through the horrors of Japanese fascism and militarism, and it is easy to read Demons as an attack on the ultra-nationalism that still plagues Japanese society. This is easily one of the bleakest and most uncompromising films I have seen recently, but it is a necessary film, and it makes for searing drama. There is no escape.