Demons

Gengobe loses the money he needs to join the forty-seven ronin to a confidence trick run by a geisha and her husband. What he loses is not only money but the possibility of a death worth his name, and all that is left is revenge, which unmakes him as a person in a single night. Toshio Matsumoto adapted a nineteenth-century kabuki text and staged nearly all of it in darkness, with light arriving exactly when a face or a blade must be seen. Katsuo Nakamura leads. The violence is not withheld but held on at length, inviting endurance rather than spectacle. Matsumoto's background in experimental film breaks the period-drama form from the inside here. Who it is for: viewers who like black-and-white Japanese cinema and formal experiment. Who it is not for: anyone with no tolerance for sustained scenes of torture.