REVIEW OF THE CRITERION COLLECTIONS JIGOKU
I have a huge pile of Halloween type titles I'm reviewing at present- ain't life good! But the problem with writing about what you love in bulk is finding time to say everything you want. I'm sure this won't be the last time I write about Nobuo Nakagawa's masterpiece Jigoku. Scary for reasons tht go way beyond it's violent depiction of souls in torment this Buddhist take on hell takes the subject of sin very seriously and the art of filmmaking to levels of brilliance. An essential part of any J Horror collection.
My first encounter with Asian Horror cinema was the masterpiece Kwaidan. Next came the massive wave that all horror fans have experienced in the last decade. In the middle of that another piece from about the same time period- Onibaba, left me almost in a state of awe. Only Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse or better yet Cure, or perhaps the original Ringu seemed to achieve (if only for moments) the same sort of cinematic space where art and dread joined forces to haunt the viewer in a way rarely encountered. They were apocalyptic films that paradoxically signaled that horror was alive and well in the East and waiting to be tapped into. They made Dracula’s famous phrase come alive “There are things worse than death”. Jigoku joins that short list. Translated directly as "Hell" the film could loosely be called an Asian Dante’s Inferno but this might give a potential audience the impression that the film is inaccessible, too arty, and nothing could be further from the truth. Instead what we get is a complex a multilayered rumination on life and death redemption and damnation and most of all the inescapable guilt we feel about sin. Of course ultimately Jigoku’s worldview is Buddhist rather than Christian and yet it’s vision of hell is a truly universal one.
A young theology student keeps bad company- a truly wicked friend who involves him in a hit and run. After the incident he is tortured by his own guilt and his wicked twin but unable to accept true responsibility for what he has don. All roads in Nakagawa’s universe end in Jigoku.
Nakagawa is often thought of as the father of the Japanese Horror film. I suspect this isn’t far from the truth. More than even the look of the film (incredibly violent for it’s time) is the roots of the story in a folklore, a collective belief system. Even if audiences of its central place and time considered such beliefs antiquated or somewhat quaint (and this is probably not as much the case as many Westerners think) Jigoku no doubt was foreboding in a way that American horror cinema almost never has been. It seems based in an inescapable reality that is at once spiritual and real an incarnational understanding of the world. Not pantheistic but deistic where all truth haunts captures, sublimates. This also underscores the violence of Nakagawa’s vision. These are souls who suffer pointlessly because of evil rather than allow suffering to serve in their redemption.
As with virtually any Criterion release the Special Features truly are. "Building the Inferno," a new documentary on director Nobuo Nakagawa and the making of the film is extremely informative for anyone who wants to study the beginnings of J Horror or the themes of the film and includes interviews with Nakagawa collaborators as well as Kiyoshi Kurasawa. They are buttressed by the included booklet which offers an essay by Bangkok writer Chuck Stephens as well as a Theatrical trailer and galleries of posters from selected Nakagawa and Shintoho studio films.
To say that the film looks absolutely gorgeous and is presented in it’s original aspect ratio of 2:35:1 might give you the idea that it’s pretty to look at. Trust me Hieronymus Bosch has nothing on Nakagawa when it comes to capturing the suffering of the damned.
