Onibaba (Shindo, 1964)

[madali]

Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1964)

Ancient rural lives in old Japanese films seems like such a hellish life. None of the romantic idyllic existence that other countries' cinemas seem to have with their rural existence.

In "Devil Woman", there is a war going in Japan, and it is affecting everyone's lives. Farms are left unattended, because the men have gone to war or farms destroyed, leaving people starving and poor, and resorting to stealing and killing. A middle-aged woman and her daughter-in-law kill soldiers to are passing their farm for their armor, and they exchange it for food. One day, a friend of the woman's son and the girl's husband comes back from the war, claiming that he has escaped, and that the son was killed. Slowly, he starts hitting on the girl, which the woman doesn't like, because she figures, if the man marries the girl, she'll lose the only help left. The film title's name (translated as Demon Hag) is a reference to her, the mother-in-law from hell, mother-in-laws always terrorizing people in popular culture and jokes.

The movie is a bit disjointed and the show is a bit like a "Twilight Show" episode where the final scene has a sort of ironic twist to it, but a twilight twist usually has 20 minutes of a show before the ironic finale, but in this film, it is 103 minutes. Too much of a movie to make the point it did.

2/5

[X.]

The score is pretty sweet though.

[madali]

On that, I agree completely.