Writer(s): Shindo
Starring: Kichiemon Nakamura, Nobuko Otowa, Kiwako Taichi, and Hideo Kanze
I have seen a lot of well-shot horror movies lately—Night of the Hunter and Eyes Without a Face spring immediately to mind—and yet none of them can touch the visual poetry on display in Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko. Oftentimes, when focusing on primarily-visual films, critics will mention how you can take a snapshot of every single frame of film, and every one would be a beautifully composed, perfect picture. But more often than not, this comes off as pure hyperbole. Kuroneko is perhaps the closest, if not the only one, where such lavish praise is completely true—every scene seems intent on furthering its eerie atmosphere, and it does this through a series of inventive shots. Just from witnessing this movie, I am unsurprised that Mr. Shindo lasted a whopping seven decades in the film industry.
Though sometimes touted as a horror story, Kuroneko is, at its heart, a surprisingly poignant tale of love. There are the typical trademarks of a horror film—some graphic violence (for the time), the haunting images, and two ghosts as the main stars—but it never seems interested in crossing the line from eerie to truly terrifying, instead focusing on the emotional aspects of its tale. This is a welcome change from the norm; one that attacks and plays on our emotions in an attempt to elicit fear, rather than relying on a series of shocks that quickly wear off.
In a house surrounded by a bamboo grove (in fact, its full Japanese title translates to “A Black Cat in a Bamboo Grove”) lives Yone, and her daughter-in-law Shige. As the film opens, a group of samurai close in on the house, looking for some food and perhaps a place to stay. When they find two women, they see a way to release some built-up desires; the group take turns raping the women, before leaving them for dead. To ensure that they complete their task, they set the house on fire.
Curiously, the house burns down around the corpses, leaving them in relatively good shape for having suffered third-degree burns over their entire bodies. A black cat enters the frame, and begins to purr and meow around them, before licking their faces.
A short while later, a man who is related to the two women, and who is a swordsman, returns from fighting in a war. He sees the burned-down shell of his former house, and interrogates the neighbors about the events, hoping to find someone that knows what happened; since none of the neighbors witnessed anything concrete, he remains unsure as to the circumstances surrounding their fates.
As it turns out, the women have made pacts with a demon to grant them revenge—in exchange for the ability to roam about the Earth as ghosts, thus avoiding a hellish eternity in the underworld, they must lure and kill every samurai that they encounter. To do this, Shige, who is young and attractive, lures passing samurai to their elegant home, by pretending she is lonely and in need of help. When they arrive at their destination, she invites them in; perhaps sensing an opportunity to sleep with the young lady, they always accept. From there, the mother loads them up on some strong sake, and once the samurai pass out, usually frolicking in the sheets with the young woman, Shige bites out their throats.
This happens like clockwork many times before it captures the attention of local Japanese authorities, who send Hachi, their best swordsman, to figure out what is leaving throatless male corpses all over the Japanese countryside. But as it turns out, Hachi is Shige’s husband, and Yone’s son, who was off for several years fighting in a war, where he attained the role of samurai. This leads to a conflict of interest on both sides: Do the ghosts ignore their pact and let Hachi go, thus incurring the wrath of the underworld? Does Hachi have the nerve to kill his own wife and mother?
Kuroneko’s biggest problem is how much stock it puts into its images: we’ve already mentioned that it’s a gorgeous work, but the story is rather repetitive. Even worse, it squanders a rather emotional middle section, by far the peak of the entire film, by featuring a lackluster ending that feels like a total regression. Judging from the way Mr. Shindo confidently handles his material, I figured he had a final trick up his sleeve; a final image or scene to one-up them all. On these grounds, the finale was a huge disappointment.
If you like your horror Japanese, then you will probably love Kuroneko even more than I did. Fans of visually-driven horror will also find plenty to like, so I’m recommending it heartily to this kind of crowd—all others should approach with a fair amount of caution.
RECAP: I liked Kuroneko, but for me, visuals can only carry a film so far. The story is good, but doesn’t even come close to matching the level of quality that the visuals clearly strive to maintain. There is some depth to the story—the aforementioned relationship between Hachi and his dead wife, which sounds creepy when I say it that way, is surprisingly resonant—but it relies all too often on repetition, which really bogs certain sections down, all the while leading to an ending that just feels anti-climactic. Recommended to fans of Japanese horror cinema, but others should approach with caution; this certainly isn’t a movie I’d want to watch again, at least anytime soon, despite the excellent photography.
RATING: 6.5/10
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