Yasuzō Masumura adapts Junichiro Tanizaki’s story as a visually arresting story of sexually charged vengeance.
A young woman (Ayako Wakao) is sold to a geisha house and branded by her pimp with a spider tattoo. This imbues her with supernatural abilities and she soon uses her powers to turn the tables on the men who have abused her...
Masumura builds on the provocative sexual frankness of his earlier film Manji and imbues it with an altogether more otherworldly air. Key to the film’s impact is the cinematography from Kazuo Miyagawa, one of Japan’s most renowned cinematic artists whose roster of illustrious collaborators included Masumura’s more celebrated contemporaries Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi.
The look of the film: claustrophobic, heavily saturated and with an emphasis on sharp contours, evokes ukiyo-e woodblock aesthetics to craft a blood-splattered dream state of a movie. Masumura’s incisive direction and Miyagawa’s visual stylings are now rendered in sharper detail in this new restoration c/o Kadokawa.
A 4K restoration c/o Kadokawa.
With an intro by Rayna Denison, Professor of Film and Digital Arts and Head of Department for Film and Television at the University of Bristol.
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