Pitfall (1962, Hiroshi Teshigahara) (Patreon)

52/100

We might have a Kiyoshi Kurosawa situation here. Pulse ranks among my favorite films of this century (currently #19), yet I don't much like any of Kurosawa's other films—and I've seen 16 of 'em, always hopeful for another transcendently disquieting experience. (I know, you think Cure is exactly that. Sure wish I did. Tried again, still no.) Similarly, while Woman in the Dunes was on the 2012 iteration of my Sight & Sound ballot (it's since dropped to "only" 93/100), I can't find my way into the two other collaborations between Teshigahara and Kōbō Abe that Criterion has released. Pitfall caught me off guard by unexpectedly becoming a ghost story following roughly 35 minutes of apparent gritty naturalism, and it features one of the most casually brutal murders in screen history, with the assassin trailing his victim at a short distance and then, after being noticed, matching the victim's increasingly panicked jog even while donning white gloves in preparation for his attack. And the idea of truly impotent spectres, unable to do anything but watch as their deaths not only go unavenged but are revealed as cogs in an inexplicably (to them) fiendish machine, is potent on paper. (I'm kind of talking myself into liking the film more as I describe it, which sometimes happens. One of the reasons I enjoy writing up my reactions.) But whereas Woman in the Dunes remains elusive enough to support any number of interpretations, Pitfall marries its metaphysics to a remarkably specific critique of in-fighting within the Japanese labor movement, as the narrative eventually coalesces into a byzantine plot to provoke the leaders of rival locals (or whatever the Japanese equivalent is) into killing each other. The non-existential dread and socio-economic anger don't dovetail particularly well, and I never got a handle on Abe's decision to give the murdered miner a young son who just sort of rolls with Dad's death and wanders around stealing candy—the kid's presumably a symbol of something, but I couldn't tell you of what. Intriguing but ultimately frustrating, which is exactly what I think of most Kiyoshi Kurosawa films.