by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Hiroshi Teshigahara
CAST: Eiji Okada, Kyôko Kishida
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh
PLOT: An entomologist on vacation is trapped by local villagers into living with a woman at the bottom of a sand pit that threatens to engulf them unless they shovel sand every night without fail.
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, which plays like a modern-day existential horror film from A24, is laden with as much symbolism and metaphor as Pilgrim’s Progress or Animal Farm. It’s remarkable how contemporary it feels, from the editing style to the storytelling to the boldly provocative plot twists involving sensuality and a potential rape-on-demand. This is a movie designed to be argued about, in all the best ways.
After an unsettling credits sequence featuring music that would be right at home in The Shining or Shutter Island, we meet Niki Jumpei (whose name we don’t discover until the closing minutes of the film), an entomologist who has taken a 3-day leave to search the sand dunes of a local beach for a new variation of beetle in hopes of getting his name in the encyclopedia. As evening starts to fall, a local man informs Niki he’s missed the last bus home and offers the hospitality of his village for the night. Niki accepts, but the creepy, discordant music on the soundtrack tips us off that not all is as it seems. It’s this juxtaposition of normalcy with weirdness that creates such a modern atmosphere of dread. I was reminded of the great sci-fi puzzler Under the Skin, which features similar “normal” scenes underscored with nerve-jangling music.
The villager leads Niki to the edge of a vast pit dug into the sand. A ramshackle house sits at the bottom. The rear of the house is engulfed with sand that is seen in many cutaway shots as it shifts, crumbles, collapses, and threatens to swallow the whole house at any minute. This is where Niki will spend the night along with the house’s single inhabitant, an unnamed Woman who goes out of her way to be as courteous as possible to her overnight guest, fixing dinner, making tea, but politely telling him it’s impossible to take a shower until the day after tomorrow.
Sand is ever-present in this story. The Woman has to set up an umbrella over Niki’s head as he dines because sand leaks through the roof. The teapot has a separate protective lid that goes over the spout. Parts of the floor of the house are covered with rugs that are clearly covering bare patches of sand rather than any kind of wooden floor. And that creepy score continues in the background…
It should be mentioned that the only way to GET to the house at the bottom of the pit is via a long rope ladder. This is important, because the next morning Niki discovers the ladder is gone, and no one at the top of the pit will answer his calls to send it back down. Then the Woman tells him the truth: he has been “drafted” to assist her with shoveling sand every single night to prevent it from consuming the entire house, because otherwise the sand will advance to the next house in the village, and the next, and the next. But he can never leave. This is his new home.
What follows is an expertly told story of a man whose entire self, not just the house, is in danger of being subsumed by the sand and by the Woman who has accepted her fate. (There’s more to the Woman than that simplistic description, but I don’t want to give away more plot developments.) This is the kind of creepy story that would be right at home in Black Mirror. It also offers the kind of symbology that lends itself to more interpretations than the Bible.
The one that occurred to me as I watched it was fatalistic, and perhaps the simplest. The sand is death. The man and woman toil endlessly to keep the sand at bay, to keep it from ending their lives, while those outside of the pit might be a representation of God or whatever name you want to give to the engine of the universe that brought us into existence. We are thrown into the pit and condemned to shovel uselessly against the marching sands of time; we can either rage against our lot, as Niki does, or accept it, as the Woman does.
Or, perhaps it’s a screed against religious indoctrination altogether. The house and the pit might represent religion, and the villagers are the religious leaders who throw us into the pit and encourage us to dig and dig for the rest of our lives, so we always try and try to meet impossible standards while never questioning why we’re doing this in the first place. Niki asks the Woman a crucial question at one point: “Are you shoveling sand to live? Or are you living to shovel sand?” The Woman, who has accepted her role in this folly, smiles, doesn’t answer, and keeps shoveling.
OR…if you really want to go out in left field…the pit is the entertainment industry. The man and Woman are creators, toiling incessantly at the Sisyphean task of keeping the villagers (the public/audience) satisfied, and they can never stop because the villagers won’t let them. There is a moment when Niki desperately asks the villagers if they’ll let him out for an hour a day just so he can see the ocean. They confer and say they’ll grant him his wish…if he and the Woman copulate in front of them. Is this the audience asking for more and more explicitness and freedom in their movies and TV shows and music, etc.? Like I said, that interpretation is kind of out there, but I offer it as an example of how many different interpretations are possible in this story.
The ending is another head-scratcher, itself offering as many different interpretations as the rest of the story. Is it a positive message about people finding happiness by accepting their fate? Or a negative message about people who only BELIEVE they’ve found happiness when in fact the stress of their lives has driven them slightly around the bend? I’m inclined towards the latter interpretation, but either variation works.
There’s a lot more to talk about in this film – the black-and-white cinematography, the dreamlike imagery of sand, sand on sand, sand on skin, sand in close-up, etc. The two main actors whose individual performances are sensational. I had read about Woman in the Dunes for years and was consumed with curiosity how such a simple plot could support a 2+ hour movie. Now I know. I encourage you to find out how they did it for yourself.
[Now available on home video or streaming for free on YouTube TV, the Criterion Channel, or TCM. You can rent or buy it on Prime Video or Apple TV.]
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 