Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
Written by Kobo Abe
Produced by Tadashi Ono
Cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa
Edited by Fusako Morimichi
Sound by Kenji Mori and Junosuke Okuyama
Titles designed by Kiyoshi Awazu
Starring
Kunie Tanaka as the Man in White
Hisashi Igawa as the miner
Kazuo Miyahara as the son
Sumie Sasaki as the candy seller
Kanichi Omiya as the second miner
Shigeru Matsuo as the farmer
Hisashi Igawa as union miner Otsuka
Sen Yano as union miner Toyama
Kei Sato as the reporter
Kikuo Kaneuchi as the photographer
Hideo Kanze as cop
…
"Why did you kill me?!"
…
Review by William D. Tucker.
A pair of subsistence miners wander hills and mountains, seeking work, a little boy in tow, while one daydreams about getting a secure union job, and the other fantasizes about being reborn as a demon in hell.
Okay, the child is also a subsistence miner. The guy who daydreams of unionization seems to be his father, though the details of this are left vague. I found myself interpreting this desperate trio as an improvised family unit-wanderers in the wilderness deciding not to be totally alone, at least for the moment. They come from nowhere. They might be fugitives from justice-except I'm not sure 'justice' exists in the world of this movie. So, like, they're fugitives from injustice, I suppose. Perhaps they exist because a writer wrote a screenplay and a director supervised a casting call and jobbing actors showed up to do their thing.
The trio con an elderly farmer into mining his property for non-existent ore-but it could also be the case that the old man simply took pity upon the obviously malnourished three and set them upon an absurd task so they can maintain a tragic working man's pride. The wages of this job are balls of sticky white rice and water.
A sinister dapper man dressed all in white surveils the union-dreamer at a distance with a telephoto lens. This MIW-Man-in-White-rides a motorscooter and eventually reveals himself to be an assassin working for the mining company or an allegorical embodiment of murderous capitalism or a mad psychopath or a stand-in for some authorial figure-God? Fate? A novelist? A film director?-or all of the above. Or none of the above. Maybe he's just a guy likes to fuck with people. Maybe he's a MIB-Man-in-Black-in disguise as a MIW. Like one of those dudes who intimidates UFO witnesses and tries to keep a lid on Mothman and the Goatsucker. Maybe this creep realized he could make a better living as an enforcer for capitalism instead of fooling around with the high strangeness tinfoil tabloid crap. Makes sense. That's probably what I would do in his situation.
The trio find their way to a recruiting station for the big mining company in the region, and the demon-dreamer gets arrested for some unspecified crime and dragged out of the film. The union-dreamer is given directions to a worksite after he is shown a photo of himself.
"Follow this map to your new boss."
Our union-dreamer does as he's told and ends up murdered by the MIW en route to a bogus worksite that turns out to be nothing but an abandoned town. But in this cruel world, death is not the end. Nor is there an Afterworld-no Heaven, no Hell. No Jesus, or Buddha, or Satan, or God, or L. Ron Hubbard waiting to embrace you. You’re just a ghost who can't communicate with the living, who can only spectate the ensuing desultory police investigation of your own corpse, and holler impotently for justice and answers and reasons why that do not exist in this reality.
Believe it or not . . . it actually gets worse for our ghost.
Because as he wanders the land, invisibly trailing cops and journalists as they investigate his brutal murder, he discovers that he has a double. This double is a miner who is also a union leader. The assassin was seemingly targeting this other more consequential guy, and mistakenly killed the subsistence miner. Our ghost realizes that his death was not only pointless . . . but that this other guy who looks exactly like him has been living his dream. What a mindfuck, right?
Meanwhile, our MIW bribes a potential murder witness into silence . . .only to later murder her on a whim. This witness is a candy seller scraping by in the abandoned town. She is also the person to call the police and report our subsistence miner's murder. And, before she is strangled to death by the weirdly indecisive MIW, she is raped by the uniformed cop who responds to her call. The candy seller also ends up as a pissed-off ghost.
I suppose the one good thing is that the ghosts can see each other and speak to one another. The dead can commiserate . . . but only with the dead.
And it gets worse for those among the living. The actions of the MIW end up causing paranoid conflict among the unionized miners who are already pressured by the company to fight among themselves for more productive veins of ore.
It doesn't end well.
But it all looks and sounds amazing.
Authentically harsh outdoor locations evoke industrialized man-made hells-on-earth shot in pristine deep focus black and white.
Gruelling summer weather and its effects upon human bodies are captured for-fucking-real on film. No pampered Hollywood pretty people luxuriating inside air conditioned green boxes on this one.
No stunt team, either. When a couple of pissed-off dudes fight to the death in the mud and slurry of a tapped-out former mining site, it's as down and dirty as you can get short of a snuff picture.
The discordant soundtrack hammers home the theme of a world where injustice for the living means restless ghosts and cruel children who pull apart frogs for fun.
That's right: the little boy survives, but who knows what kind of killer he may grow up to be after all the trauma, starvation, isolation, and moral insanity to which he has been exposed.
Hey: maybe that’s how you get a headstart on the MIW career track.
Pitfall is an immaculately bleak hellscape for the whole family!
