DEMON POND 4K Review: Kabuki Is Better With Fish People

One of the most elaborate (and expensive) films made in Japan in its era, director Masahiro Shinoda's full-text reading of Demon Pond is an astonishing feat of physical production. Drawn from a 1913 kabuki play by Kyoka Izumi, the 1979 film remains fundamentally stagey: action is confined to a handful of spaces, and though the location of the proscenium might change, the characters feel like they are rooted in their world, rather than moving through it.

Shinoda slips seamlessly from location work to gargantuan sets to special effects, though, lending the entire effort a dreamlike quality. You never really feel like you know what you're looking at, from one moment to the next.

A lone professor (Tsutomu Yamazaki) is on summer holiday, exploring rural Japan, when he visits the Demon Pond, which local legends say has a white dragon sleeping beneath its surface. Beyond the pond, he finds a drought-stricken village -- indeed, so drought-stricken that he interrupts a funeral in progress, and is then offered milk straight from a villager's breast, in lieu of water.

This village has a covenant with the dragon. So long as they ring the village bell at three specific times every day, the dragon will remain asleep. If the dragon wakes, it will flood the village.

This deal, it turns out, is starting to wear on the parties on both sides. The villagers, mid-drought, are starting to look upon that threatened flood as a godsend rather than a curse. The dragon, on the other hand, wants to fly south to meet its lover, and is tired of slumbering at the bottom of the pond.

The professor, meanwhile, finds his former best friend Akira (Go Kato), who disappeared three years ago, has taken up the mantle of bell-ringer for the village, having quietly married a ghostly woman, Yuri (legendary kabuki performer Tamasaburo Bando, who also plays the dragon). As Akira and the professor rekindle their friendship -- and Yuri begins to fret about her husband abandoning her, the strength seeming to leech out of her in some mystical way -- the creatures of the Demon Pond stir, and debate their course of action.

Scenes are filmed in exterior villages and then transition to mirror sets built on soundstages, which slightly amp up the theatricality; the village bell serves as a visual anchor, appearing in both location photography and soundstage work, appearing the same even as the world beyond it seems to shift and morph.

Director Shinoda is subtly preparing us for the staging's biggest gambit, which comes at the halfway point and after an hour of drama so placid that it has nearly become soporific. Akira and his friend range off into the hills to seek the Demon Pond, and as they go, a crab saves a carp from a greedy fisherman... and the carp and the crab stand up out of the water, and wander away chattering with each other.

We transition into a full underground set, the world beneath the Demon Pond, in which a phalanx of kabuki performers in various fish-and-animal drag cavort around the dragon princess, who is contemplating breaking free of her bond.

The audience's patience for all this is going to likely tie pretty closely to their patience for the repetitive rhythms of kabuki itself, which sees the characters (who are at this point, I would repeat, fish people) entering into endless loops of conversation where griefs and hopes are stated once, twice, three times or more in an ongoing roundelay.

The visual design, particularly below the pond, is striking -- the dragon princess is flanked by a crone-like nurse and a maiden-esque camellia flower, who pepper her with advice -- and the production wisely plays against kabuki tradition by including a beguiling, synth-based score.

It still all feels fairly dull to me, at least until the last reel bows some surprisingly spectacular power-of-god opticals, like seeing what the Ark of the Covenant might have done if had chosen water instead of fire as its weapon of choice in the last reel of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Demon Pond joins the Criterion Collection at spine #1237. It has been remastered in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative, with supervision by the director, and actor Bando (!). The 4K transfer does an excellent job of retaining film-like grain and nuance, although the colour palette overall is still too pallid to really make the transfer stand out. Dolby Vision is not included on this release, which is presented in HDR10 only.

As usual, a second disc includes the film on Blu-ray, along with a pair of special features. One is an 18-minute overview with film scholar Dudley Andrew; the other, more entertaining (at least to me), is a detailed look at the career of visual effects artist Nobuo Yajima, who produced special effects for Star Wars knockoff Message From Space before creating Demon Pond's wrath-of-the-gods finale.