Absolutely stunning cinematography! The black and white photography rather than make the film appear stark gives it a sensuality and lushness that it would not be capable of in color. The cinematography is not just a background for the film, but part of the story. The movement of the grass highlights the psychology of the characters. The score, which features an atonal tribal-like jazz rhythm, may appear simple, but like the photography provides a rich texture to the film. The taunt direction, along with the acting, the sound track, and cinematography are all superb. However, more time should have been focused on the storyline, which could have turned this B- film into an A film. Loosely based on a Buddhist folktale, it doesn’t work as a moral parable. Neither does it work as a film depicting the human condition on celluloid unless you are devoted follower of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and believe that man’s nature is “a dog eat dog world.” (something my dog might object to, if he could speak). It is a capitalist fantasy that war brings out only the worst in people. People have been affected by war and yet still display great nobleness even in the face of evil. Here we just have 3 selfish, amoral people, whose only basic thoughts are only survival, i,e, food, sex, and shelter. This isn’t a parable about morality or war; the film is a voyeuristic journey into 3 depraved individuals who were depraved before the war and are still depraved during the war. Worth viewing for the cinematography, but that’s all.

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The chief visual element in this 1964 film by the prolific Shindô Kaneto is the grass. When we aren't in modest peasant huts, we're in great fields of head-high susuki grass moving in languorous waves that suggest the stirring of a living creature. Within this seemingly boundless savanna, beautifully photographed by Kuroda Kiyomi, live an unnamed woman (Shindô regular Otowa Nobuko) and her unnamed daughter-in-law (Yoshimura Jitsuko), a resourceful, abandoned pair, who survive by preying on derelict samurai, throwing their stripped bodies into a hole, and selling their equipage. (They prefigure the pair of vengeful ghost women in Shindô's 1968 “Kuroneko.”) A destabilizing element arrives with the return of their neighbor Hachi (Satô Kei). A fellow peasant, conscripted by warring samurai, Hachi has fled from battles in which he has no stake, battles that have taken the life of the missing son-husband. He adds to the equation an element of sexual tension and even sexual rivalry between the women. While an eerily supernatural note is struck when a lone samurai appears wearing a demon (oni) mask that he is unable to remove, this is not a ghost story. It is, rather, a story about survival among hut- and cave-dwelling humans existing at a subsistence level in harsh times. Survival of course involves procreation, and the element of lust, urgent and primal, is also central. But it is also, visually, about grass, the medium through which these characters move. When the young woman runs through it to meet her lover, it whispers softly, seductively.

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