Onibaba - a discussion about the japanese horror movie by Kaneto Shindo

Yeah, so I picked the movie Onibaba by Kaneto Shindo, which is a film I love very much and I think is a very fascinating film.

And funnily enough, because of course our viewers don't know this, but behind the scenes I kind of gave a couple of options of films I'd like to discuss.

And there we figured out that actually calling ourselves World in a Frame is a bit strange since we haven't really covered anything outside of Europe and the US.

So, yeah, I think it's a great pick that we go to Asia this time.

And Kaneto Shindo is a pretty popular Japanese filmmaker, but kind of lower tier, like not as popular, of course, as Kurosawa or Ozu or Kurosawa or so.

But he's fairly popular.

This is by far, I think, his most famous film, the one he's most well remembered for.

and um it's a really fascinating film i mean um to explain the basic story maybe it's about these two women in uh japan and like i don't know the 13th century or something like uh uh long time ago and there is war so the husband of the younger woman who is also the son of the older woman he has gone to war and left them too alone and so in order not to like literally starve they have to make money and they do so by killing samurai and selling their weapons and their clothes and whatever and then one day another guy comes back from war who went to war with the son slash husband and he tells them that he has died but now he has come back and will take care of them or whatever and the younger woman actually kind of falls in love or at least starts to have sex with this guy, which the older woman wants to stop.

She's very, I mean, we can get into the motivations of her later on.

I think that's an interesting aspect to talk about.

But in order to stop them, she takes the mask that she took from one of the killed samurai, which is this famous Oni mask, Oni is like a Japanese demon.

I'm not super into the Japanese folklore and stuff, so please forgive me for any mistakes I might make.

But yeah, she puts on this mask and goes into the rice field and like scares her away whenever she tries to go have sex with this other guy.

And of course, the probably most infamous part of the film is the ending where the daughter comes back home.

And the older woman is still wearing the mask because she can't get it off.

Like there's some kind of weird curse or illness or whatever on her and she can't get the mask off.

So then she begs the young woman for forgiveness and tells her like, please help me and you can do whatever you want with him.

So the young woman, she breaks the mask off her face, which is such a brutal scene.

It's wonderful, really.

And we see that the old woman has like all these like blisters and her skin is almost rotten, which is the same way the samurai looked when she took the mask off of him.

um and then of course the the older woman eventually um falls into the same pit that she used to throw all the samurai uh in to kill them and dies herself and this is really funny um then i'm i stopped talking for a bit but in in german and i don't know if there's an equivalent in in english or other languages but in german there is a very famous like idiom or saying which is basically whoever digs a hole for someone else will fall into it themselves so the film is kind of spoiled if you if you know this german saying but yeah now i'll give it off to you and please let me know what you thought of this film