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Amateur entomologist Junpei Niki (Eiji Okada) is on a three-day insect-collecting expedition in a rural coastal area, when a local villager informs him that he has missed the last bus back to town. Luckily (or perhaps, unluckily) the villager offers to find Junpei somewhere to stay for the night.

Delighted by the prospect of experiencing small-town hospitality, Junpei follows him to a woman’s house at the bottom of a vast sand pit. The woman, masterfully portrayed by Kyōko Kishida, welcomes him warmly into her home. It isn’t until the following morning that Junpei discovers that the wooden ladder used to access the pit has been pulled up, and he realises that his “local experience” is a far cry from the quaint encounter he had imagined.

Based on the widely translated 1962 avant-garde masterpiece novel by Kōbō Abe, Woman in the Dunes is a unique tale of entrapment and survival that has been widely regarded as a landmark of Japanese New Wave cinema. Every element of the film—from its screenplay and performances to its cinematography, direction, and haunting, minimalist score—converge to create a palpable and overwhelming sense of claustrophobia, in a seamless marriage of sound and moving image.

Shot on location at the Hamaoka sand dunes in Shizuoka Prefecture, Woman in the Dunes is a masterful visual composition, that also delves into the Sisyphean condition of the human experience. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival and nominated for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film (1964) and Best Director (1965), Woman in the Dunes stands as one of the defining works of its era.

M | Mature themes, sexual violence and nudity