Eiji Okada

Kyôko Kishida

Hiroko Itō

Kōji Mitsui

Hiroshi Teshigahara

Kōbō Abe

Fusako Shuzui

Hiroshi Segawa

Tadashi Ôno

Kiichi Ichikawa

Toru Takemitsu

Masao Yamazaki

Ichirō Katō

Shigenosuke Okuyama

Keiji Mori

Tōtetsu Hirakawa

Isao Fujisawa

Drama

Thriller

砂の女

Teshigahara Productions

Japan

日本語

Woman in the Dunes

based on novel or book

insect

sand

art house

water shortage

psychological thriller

black and white

held captive

skin

trapped

missing person

sexual torture

sand dune

erotic photography

water pump

japanese new wave

slave labor

entomologist

escape attempt

sand pit

forced labor

texture

avant garde

disappeared

barbaric behavior

- to me utterly & completely incomprehensable that this movie has been so neglected ,  Not included in - more 'popular' -watchlists ( or 'best movie' -lists ... )  -  it is a Grand Feast for the eyes and the mind :
 the story ,  the acting ,  the photography is of such superb level !!!  -  i would hot hesitate to rate it ( - actually with many movie-'professionals'  ... ) as among the top twenty best ( cinema-proper ) films ever made .

CinemaSerf

Yikes, but for a film almost entirely set outdoors it’s remarkably claustrophobic! It’s about the exploring bug hunter “Jumpei” (Eiji Okada) who finds himself a bit lost out in the sand dunes after he misses the last bus of the day. A friendly villager offers him some shelter for the night, buy boy is he ill-prepared for quite what that man, and his entire village, has in store. He is placed with a widow, but when he wakes in the morning discovers that her home is deep within a sand well and the only way out is the ladder he climbed down to enter - and that’s gone! It’s a precarious existence for this women (Kyôko Kishida) for if she doesn’t keep the sand levels down, they will swamp her home and swallow her up. The villagers assist in so far as they help dispose of the collected sand and they provide her - and now him - with some weekly rations, but she has no inclination to leave her pit and they seem content to watch him scratch about in the sand just as he was to look at creatures with more legs doing the same. Gradually a bond starts to build between the two, but he is always on the look out for a means of escape, and his captors know that - exacting some torrid vengeance upon both of them as a sort of sport after an attempted escape goes awry. In the end, he begins to realise that it’s distinctly possible that he, she or both may die in the hole and his options aren’t getting any better from day to day. It’s really quite a cerebrally gruesome film to watch this. To see two human beings toyed with as a cat would a mouse is a tough watch and both actors really do deliver strongly, imbuing their scenario with respective senses of acceptance and frustration. At times there are almost cruelly pagan elements to the behaviour on display here, but it is also just possible that there is a scintilla of goodness intended somewhere along the line, too? It’s tautly directed and the sparing but increasingly frenetic dialogue really helps to create a feeling that actually made me feel a little breathless at times. Maybe next time you walk along the beach, you’d best take an escape kit!

Original Trailer

Criterion Trailer

Woman in the Dunes( 1964)

Haunting. Erotic. Unforgettable.

Overview

Top Billed Cast

Social

A review by hanszha

Written by hanszha on Fri Dec 15 2023

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