Woman in the Dunes main backdrop
Woman in the Dunes main poster

Woman in the Dunes

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8.2/10 • 477

1964-02-152h 27m

DramaThriller

Haunting. Erotic. Unforgettable.

A vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.

Directors
Hiroshi Teshigahara
Editors
Fusako Shuzui

Top Billed Cast

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  1. Eiji Okada

    Eiji Okada

    Entomologist Niki Jumpei

  2. Kyôko Kishida

    Kyôko Kishida

    The Woman

  3. Hiroko Itō

    Hiroko Itō

    Entomologist's Wife

  4. Kōji Mitsui

    Kōji Mitsui

    Village Elder

Reviews1

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CinemaSerf Avatar

CinemaSerf

Feb 6, 2025

7/10

Yikes, but for a film almost entirely set outdoors it’s remarkably claustrophobic! It’s about the exploring bug hunter “Jumpei” (Eiji Okada) who finds himself a bit lost out in the sand dunes after he misses the last bus of the day. A friendly villager offers him some shelter for the night, buy boy is he ill-prepared for quite what that man, and his entire village, has in store. He is placed with a widow, but when he wakes in the morning discovers that her home is deep within a sand well and the only way out is the ladder he climbed down to enter - and that’s gone! It’s a precarious existence for this women (Kyôko Kishida) for if she doesn’t keep the sand levels down, they will swamp her home and swallow her up. The villagers assist in so far as they help dispose of the collected sand and they provide her - and now him - with some weekly rations, but she has no inclination to leave her pit and they seem content to watch him scratch about in the sand just as he was to look at creatures with more legs doing the same. Gradually a bond starts to build between the two, but he is always on the look out for a means of escape, and his captors know that - exacting some torrid vengeance upon both of them as a sort of sport after an attempted escape goes awry. In the end, he begins to realise that it’s distinctly possible that he, she or both may die in the hole and his options aren’t getting any better from day to day. It’s really quite a cerebrally gruesome film to watch this. To see two human beings toyed with as a cat would a mouse is a tough watch and both actors really do deliver strongly, imbuing their scenario with respective senses of acceptance and frustration. At times there are almost cruelly pagan elements to the behaviour on display here, but it is also just possible that there is a scintilla of goodness intended somewhere along the line, too? It’s tautly directed and the sparing but increasingly frenetic dialogue really helps to create a feeling that actually made me feel a little breathless at times. Maybe next time you walk along the beach, you’d best take an escape kit!

Media

  • Woman in the Dunes poster
  • Woman in the Dunes poster
  • Woman in the Dunes poster
  • Woman in the Dunes poster
  • Woman in the Dunes poster
  • Woman in the Dunes poster
  • Woman in the Dunes poster
  • Woman in the Dunes poster
  • Woman in the Dunes poster

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Status
Released
Original Language
Japanese
Budget
--
Revenue
--
Keywords
based on novel or bookinsectsandart housewater shortagepsychological thrillerblack and whiteheld captiveskintrappedmissing personsexual torturesand duneerotic photographywater pumpjapanese new waveslave laborentomologistescape attemptsand pitforced labortextureavant gardedisappearedbarbaric behavior