Onibaba draws from a traditional Japanese horror story about what seems to be a haunted "mask of flesh." The basic idea is old-fashioned but effective, and I've seen it used before and since. One old Twilight Zone episode had a group of corrupt heirs donning ugly masks to humor their benefactor during Mardi Gras. Naturally, the masks reflect their true selves, and when it's time to take them off, everyone has a surprise coming.

The supernatural part of Onibaba is secondary to director Shindo's main theme - the human debasement of war. The two women live in isolation and make a ghoulish living, with survival their only remaining value. It's a harsh world where everyone must make do on their own. They simply invert the expected situation - we would expect that two women alone would more likely be victimized by soldiers running from the wars.

The natural environment is everything in this picture. Their habitat is tall marsh grass, the kind that waves with every breeze, and we rarely see over it. They've barely made a path through it to get to the river. The women labor at their criminal business in the sun and by moonlight, stuffing food into their mouths when they can get it and collapsing afterwards in exhaustion.

Mother and daughter-in-law have a crooked bond that breaks with the return of the equally amoral Hachi. The women had planned for their rotten lifestyle to end with the return of their man. When they find out he's dead, all bets are off. The young widow gravitates toward Hachi out of sheer sexual desperation. He runs around in a frenzy for want of a woman, and even the mother goes slightly nuts for being shut out of all the sex. With their lives completely overrun by the base instincts of survival and sex, Onibaba is a grim microcosm of the basic human condition.

Kaneto Shindo's beautiful B&W scope images integrate the horror content with ease. The most frightening thing in the film is the black pit in the ground where the women throw the bodies of their victims. It seems to wait calmly, like a doorway to hell. The mother has to descend into the pit to carry out her plan. Without getting into details, there's this grotesque demon-mask that she "borrows" in an attempt to control her daughter-in-law's actions. It's pictured in a drawing on the DVD cover but in the film has a strange life of its own - in the shadows of their hut, or looming like a banshee in the midnight marsh grass.

In the theater there were moments of real terror that might not be easy to replicate in the distracting home theater setting. With an audience waiting as one to find out what happens next, Onibaba was riveting. There's an abrupt ending that lacks the tidy closure we expect from genre pictures. It might be a slight disappointment, like the vague conclusions of some of the tales in the more stylized Kwaidan.

Criterion's DVD of Onibaba is a stunner, starting with its superior transfer. In the enhanced scope (Tohoscope?) rendering the perpetually waving sea of grass never breaks up into digital mush. The detail and density of the image is fine - in the darker images we never feel that we're seeing too much or too little.

Director Shindo is on camera in a recent interview. He's over 90 but looks as if he could direct another film tomorrow. The fat inset booklet contains a statement from him, as well as a good essay by critic Chuck Stephens and a translation of the cryptic Buddist fable that served as the story source.

The best extra, the kind of thing we always wish would surface for our favorite films, is a lengthy home movie shot during production by Kei Sato, the actor who plays Hachi. We see the crew establishing a primitive camp out in the grass fields, and living together as a unit. They look like hardworking artisans with a communal goal, and even with the deprivations of life in the wild it must have been a group of happy campers creating something they could be proud of.

Production notes and a stills gallery explain the particular problems of filming. The unstable ground was so saturated by water that the hellish pit had to be cheated, and its interior constructed as an above-ground set.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Onibaba rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Iinterview with writer/director Kaneto Shindo, Super-8 home movie footage shot on location during the filming, stills gallery, production sketches, promotional art, English translation of the original short buddhist fable, Filmmaker's statement from writer/director Kaneto Shindo.
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: March 20, 2004