Rating: 3.5/5
Criterion Challenge 2024 | 1/52 | Spine #351-450 (#352)
Countless people have sinned on their way towards death. Could the law even begin to punish them all? Some may slip through the law's net, but they cannot elude their own consequences. Religion dreams of a world where people are punished after death for sins unpunished during life. That world is Hell.
Red skies, white ground, a green person bent down in mourning. They lift their hands and cry out. He then falls into a lake of hell.
Shiro and Tamura are cohorts in school. They attend a class about the concepts of hell from different religions. Shiro is engaged to the professor’s daughter, Yukiko.
Shiro visits Yukiko and her parents when Tamura turns up, carrying a rose and a picture that horrifies the professor.
Tamura drives Shiro at night, talking about Shiro’s future. He knows that Shiro and Yukiko are sleeping together and suggests that Yukiko is pregnant.
A drunk man staggers into the road, and Tamura hits him. He drives off, leaving the man bleeding and near death. The man is a yakuza and threatens revenge before dying. His mother witnesses the event and takes down Tamura’s license plate number.
Guilt-stricken, Shiro confesses to Yukiko the hit-and-run. They grab a taxi, but the taxi driver turns into Tamura, driving into a light pole. The impact kills Yukiko.
After a night of mourning and debauchery in the city, Shiro visits his parent’s retirement home to visit his ailing mother.
There, he learns of everyone’s dark secrets and meets a woman who could be Yukiko’s doppelgänger.
As people around him keep dying, Shiro feels closer to his inevitable fate — the fires of hell.
The plot gets knotty as twist after twist comes.
The final act of the movie takes place in hell, where we witness torments and tortures — people sawn in half, beheaded, skin ripped from their bodies, eyes gouged out, teeth bashed out of their mouths.
Tamura seems to follow Shiro everywhere, leading the viewer to wonder if Tamura is human.
The film uses the color red to signal doom. Also, several characters walk into scenes carrying a flower, almost like the flower is a physical manifestation of a secret that the character carries.
The film is weirdly horny at times, including an opening credit sequence decorated with pinup models. It has that Lynch horniness to it, where there’s an unidentifiable creepiness at the edge.
Overall, the film is a little silly, and the hell sequence goes on a bit too long, but the visuals are exciting and deeply 60s, making this an enjoyable watch.