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Escaping exploitative employment with his young son, a miner (Hisashi Igawa) searches for work, dreaming of belonging to a union. His journey leads him to a deserted mining town that had been abandoned by the male workers after the mine’s closure, leaving only a woman running an empty sweet shop (Sumie Sasaki) as the sole inhabitant. Meanwhile, the miner is shadowed by a cryptic man in an immaculate white suit (Kunie Tanaka), who photographs him from afar. Wandering in search of a better life, the miner instead finds violence and corruption waiting for him, triggering a chain of increasingly unsettling revelations.

Pitfall marked the debut feature of director Hiroshi Teshigahara and the first of his landmark collaborations with novelist and playwright Kōbō Abe and composer Tōru Takemitsu. Through the miner’s phantom perspective, the film exposes a web of corporate manipulation and union rivalry within the machine-driven modernity of post-war Japan.

Shot in black and white by cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa, spoil tips and barren fields are transformed into otherworldly landscapes, creating a striking juxtaposition against archival footage of contemporary mining conditions at the time. An early milestone of the Japanese New Wave, Pitfall blends documentary techniques with fiction to create a haunting work of avant-garde surrealism.

Ages 15+ | Contains violence and coarse language