Woman in the Dunes Movie Review

Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Rent Woman in the Dunes on Amazon Video (paid link)
Written by: Kobo Abe (novel), Kobo Abe (screenplay), Eiko Yoshida (scripting)
Directed by: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Starring: Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida, Hiroko Ito
Rated: --
Watch the trailer

Plot
Local villagers trap a man on vacation in an inescapable sand dune with a woman already imprisoned, in an effort to force him to be her husband.

Verdict
This is an amazing film. It will register stronger for students of film, but everyone can appreciate it. It creates a great mood and delves into a fascinating yet sparse story with fantastic imagery. It's part horror, part human triumph, exploring confinement and existence. It feels ahead of its time, but also completely outside of a genre.
Watch it.

Review
The music is unsettling in the first scene, the imagery is fantastic with the main character walking on the dunes.

Local villagers take him to their village and show him a woman that lives in a dune. He climbs down the ladder into the dune. He has no idea what he's gotten into. The next morning he tries to climb out but the ladder is gone. The dune is too deep, the walls too steep, and the sand crumbles beneath him. He's trapped. The woman digs the sand and sends it up a pulley.  She tells him if you don't dig, the house gets buried.

Woman in the Dunes - You can stay as long as you like, but you can't leave.

The images continues to reinforce the sweaty, dirty existence. Sand infiltrates everything. When the man comes up with a way to escape, it's only short lived.

The cinematography is great.  The music is amazing, often sounding like a horror movie.This movie is excellent, yet completely different from the typical movie. The story is stunning.

It explores confinement and accepting circumstances. You could argue this is an allegory for civilization and human interaction. The man has to be content where he is, and then can be content anywhere. He has been trying to escape for so long, even succeeding, but when he has the opportunity to climb the ladder, he's conflicted. He climbs out but returns to his water pump project. There's no need to rush off. He wants to perfect it and tell someone about it, maybe the villagers. He can leave after that, maybe tomorrow.