Woman in the Dunes Review

Kobo Abe adapted his own novel, and the premise is pure trap mechanics. Niki Junpei, a Tokyo schoolteacher hunting beetles on the coast, misses the last bus and is lowered by rope ladder to a widow's shack at the bottom of a dune. Sand pours in every night and has to be shovelled out, the villagers haul it up and sell it, and in the morning the ladder is gone. Hiroshi Teshigahara never explains more than Junpei can work out, so it plays as a captivity thriller long before it admits to being a parable.

Hiroshi Segawa films the sand so closely that it runs like water and clings to both leads like a second skin; Roger Ebert wrote that there had never been sand photography like it, not even in Lawrence of Arabia. Toru Takemitsu's score scrapes against the images instead of supporting them. Eiji Okada lets Junpei's arrogance erode by degrees, and Kyoko Kishida plays the widow as resigned, sly and lonely at once, so she never hardens into a symbol. The dialogue is spare to the point of flatness, mostly bargaining over water and shovels.

It won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and an Oscar nomination for foreign language film. The ending is quieter than any escape attempt, and far more unsettling.