Intentions of Murder

A young housewife, belittled and bullied by her domineering mother-in-law and her philandering husband, finds the painful banality of her domestic life violently upended when she’s sexually assaulted by a home invader. Unfolding with bleak precision, Intentions of Murder spares none of Sadako’s suffering with each painful day unfolding in gruelling detail, as her family continues to treat her as a slave and her rapist returns to profess his love.

With his previous film The Insect Woman Imamura opted for a decade-spanning elliptical approach to portraiture, here he discards portraiture altogether, abandoning that films objectivity in favour of something decidedly more subjective and elusive, as the film slips between dreams, memories, and misremembrances with an almost surrealist touch.

Laying bare the contradictions at the heart of Japan’s rapid industrialization from an agrarian society to an economic power, Imamura illuminates how his country's relentless drive towards modernity is undermined at every turn by the violent desires and primal superstitions still residing in the hearts of its people.

Brutal and beautiful in equal measure, Intentions of Murder is a truly remarkable feat of filmmaking, and one of only a handful of films that could truly be said to have reached the profound interiority of literature’s great tragedies, entering a pantheon alongside the likes of Thérèse Raquin and Antigone. A film that develops cumulatively with each immaculate composition, scornful utterance, and indignity suffered, building to an incontestable apogee of Imamura’s work in the first decade of his career.

Intentions of Murder (赤い殺意), dir. Shōhei Imamura, Japan 1964, Japanese with English subtitles, 153 min.