An amateur entomologist (Eiji Okada, Hiroshima Mon Amour) loses track of time hunting bugs in the sand dunes and misses the last bus home. So when a local offers to arrange a bed for the night in the nearest hamlet, he gratefully accepts. The home turns out to be a wooden shack at the bottom of a vertiginous sandpit, and despite the friendly ministrations of the attractive widow who lives there (Kyoko Kishida), the man dimly begins to realize he’s been set up… But for what?
Suspenseful and loaded with allegorical import, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s movie of Kōbō Abe’s novel (Abe wrote the screenplay) is vividly strange, erotic and disturbing. Teshigahara’s carnal, granular imagery ensnares us in the story’s existential prison, a man trap where sustenance can only be bought through hard labour, shoveling the sands of time ad infinitum.
A sensation in its day, the film even garnered Teshigahara an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. The movie’s secret weapon is the disconcerting, inspired, very modern score by Toru Takemitsu.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 20-minute introduction and talkback.
Oct 19: Intro by Dr. Su-Anne Yeo, who teaches in the Department of Theatre & Film and the Department of Asian Studies at UBC
An unforgettable cinematic experience… The film is one of unearthly power, telling the story of an entomologist trapped by villagers and forced to live with a woman in a house hemmed in by sand dunes… It comes across as a bizarre nightmare.
The Rough Guide to Film
A tour de force of visual style and a knockout as an unusually cruel thriller… the erotic attraction between the man and the woman, filmed with a palpable physicality, remains extraordinary.
Tony Rayns, Time Out
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida
Japan
1964
In Japanese with English subtitles
Book Tickets
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Credits
Cinematography
Hiroshi Segawa
Editor
Fusako Shuzui
Original Music
Toru Takemitsu
Art Director
Totetsu Hirakawa, Masao Yamazaki
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
