This week’s approximately 4 year-old-podcast movie was Japanese and 1960s, I am pretty sure? The latter is the slight uncertainty. Anyway, Jigoku is… not precisely weird, so much as foreign. So the first thing that happens[1] is a bright young college kid who is marrying the professor’s daughter and in all ways has the perfect future ahead of him, is a passenger in the car of his friend who is basically a total dick at every moment from his first scene to his last, our hero[2] I was saying is in the car with his friend Dickchan when the friend does a hit and run on a Yakuza guy.

Shiro is horrified and guilty and decides to go the the police, only on the way tragedy strikes in the form of a second car wreck for no apparent reason, and now he’s lost pretty much all of his bright future. So he goes home because his mom is sick and on the way out the door, only to discover a nest of small-town vipers, plus the Yakuza dude’s mom and girlfriend want revenge, and about two-thirds of the way through the movie, it goes full Hamlet and basically everyone you’ve seen since the first reel is now in hell and being punished, Japan-style.

So I said foreign earlier, and none of the above is what I mean. What I could not wrap my head around is why Shiro felt so guilty over all the terrible things that happened, basically none of which he had any control over or culpability in, to my Western sensibilities. And then on top of that, was he being punished in hell because of his guilty conscience, or did the movie agree with him that he was in fact terrible and deserving of all the things being promised to him by the omnipresent king of hell narrator guy? (And then there’s the girl in purgatory for the sin(?) of predeceasing her parents. I mean, yes, that’s a horrifying thing for a parent to imagine, but that should not be how the afterlife works.)

These ontological disconnects aside, I think I liked it. The tragic collapse-of-everything setpiece was engrossing, and the 65 years ago practical effects depicting the eight (or possibly sixteen) Japanese hells was a pretty solid dive into a genre with which I have very little experience, until it’s 40 years later and dominated by angry long-haired ghost girls.

I almost signed up for the 7 day free trial of Criterion for this one. They’re going to snag me, someday. I can see it coming, like a slow motion steamroller shot from 3-5 different camera angles.

[1] Not exactly a spoiler, as it’s all pretty much from the first five minutes, but if you want to check out a Criterion channel early Japanese horror flick unspoiled, hit the eject button now, as I don’t plan to be shy with laying things out.
[2] named Shiro, ha