MOVIE · 1964

Woman in the Dunes

DramaThriller147 min

On a trip from Tokyo to collect insects, an amateur entomologist is stranded in a poor seaside village and coaxed into spending the night in a hut at the bottom of a sand pit. Eiji Okada is the visitor, who wakes to find the ladder gone and the villagers expecting him to stay and shovel. In the hut with him is a young widow, Kyoko Kishida's guarded companion in the village's endless routine of digging out the encroaching dunes. Sand, sweat, and confinement press in on every scene as his captivity becomes both a physical ordeal and a psychological one.