The Embryo Hunts in Secret

A shop manager invites a young woman who works with him to his home. Once she is inside he locks the door and holds her in the flat. For seventy-two minutes the film never leaves that one apartment; what the man does to her and what he says about his own childhood, his mother and his marriage arrive one after another. The narrative builds no plot; it is a record of violence continuing in a closed space. Koji Wakamatsu was foremost among the directors who worked inside Japan's low-budget erotic film industry in the sixties and turned that form into political ground. This is one of the harshest examples of that strand and is still considered disturbing; it is not a film to approach without knowing what is in it. Wakamatsu's defence was that the violence he showed answered to a sickness in society; his critics objected that the camera turns a woman's body into something to be looked at. Both positions are on the record.