Montreal Nouveau 2023 Review: THE SIX SINGING WOMEN, Nature Bites Back

Many cultures have folklore about spirits who live in nature, as protectors of forests, rivers, animals, and really, anything on which humans might prey and inflict harm - such as what humans have sadly done for a long time. The idea of nature somehow fighting back against those who would harm it feels even more relevant in our world today, almost as an immediate necessity.

Ishibashi Yoshimasa (The Fuccon Family, Milocrorze: A Love Story) embraces these strange yet perhaps believable mythologies in The Six Singing Women. Part comedy, part fantasy, part eco-thriller, Ishibashi is covering a lot of territory to fully explore the space, as it were, of a layered and complex story. Perhaps not always successful in execution in its attempt to mine so much territory, nevertheless it evokes an often unsettling and scary atmosphere, while slowly aligning its audience with the story.

Shin (Takenouchi Yutaka) is a well-established photographer in Tokyo, who receives a call one day that his long-estranged father is dead. Having not even spoken or seen him since he was a child, Shin was hard to track down and is reluctant to return to the childhood home in the mountains, where his father lived as a recluse after being left by his wife and child. At least there is a buyer, and Shin hopes to be in and out in a day, all he has to do is sign over the property, which is turns out is most of the mountain on which the house sits. When Shin and the new owner's representative Ryo have a car accident on their way back to the city, it seems they're being set up.

There are women in this forest, it seems - are they woodland nymphs, guardians of the surrounding nature? Are they sirens, luring these men to their slow, torturous deaths? Shin wakes up with his hands bound, but it seems whichever woman (or women) he is with are more interested that he drink the carefully prepared bug soup - is this the ambrosia that will keep him tied to the land, especially since one of these women east his chocolate bar, the 'normal' food he was carrying? While Ryo is strung up in a shed, confronted by a woman wielding an axe. The difference in the way this group of women treat them is clear.

At first this situation with these clearly powerful women and these bumbling men is comic, almost with a wistful delight of Midsummer Night's Dream, as though they are in some hazy space to experience love and violence for a night. There are even small children running around - was Shin, who was lost in this forest as a child, perhaps a changling? Slowly but perceptibly, Ishibashi begins to shift from comedy to darker fantasy. The men try to help each other escape, but are frequently (deliberately) separated, and the increased desperation shows their deeper character.

For Shin, this is about discovering what his father was really doing - he had found a room filled with photographs and maps, but to what purpose? These women seem to know, but can only communicate in an indirect way. Shin's discovery of his own purpose, left to his by his father, could take him into dangerous territory. But these women, representing nature, have no option but to evoke this necessity for their survival. Ryo clearly is hiding something, as he begins to enact violence in retaliation for what he sees as an injustice on his person - clearly, the stakes run much higher.

Ishibashi meanders perhaps a little too unnecessarily in getting to his point, but the shifts in tone are met with the drive and style that guides the audience through this complex tale, finding that eco-thriller through the fantasy. Maybe it's only through this symbols that we can realize what nature is trying to tell us, and what we need to sacrifice to save it.