37 The Sting of Death

[swo17]

The Sting of Death



In the aftermath of World War II, a writer's love affair with another woman drives his wife mad with distrust. Realising his errors, he tries all he can to save her from literally losing her mind. Kohei Oguri's haunting adaptation of the novel by Toshio Shimao is shot in a hyperreal style that is equal parts painterly and unflinching. Featuring striking set design, powerful lead performances and a vivid evocation of small-town life in postwar Japan, The Sting of Death won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival while stars Ittoku Kishibe and Keiko Matsuzaka won numerous awards for their performances. Radiance Films is proud to present this remarkable film on Blu-ray for the first time in the world.

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES:

• High-Definition digital transfer
• Uncompressed mono PCM audio
• Documentary on the Japanese film renaissance of the 1990s featuring interviews with Kohei Oguri, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kaneto Shindo and others (Hubert Niogret, 2011, 52 mins)
• Interview with film scholar Hideki Maeda (2023)
• Trailer
• Newly translated English subtitles
• Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
• Limited edition booklet featuring a newly translated interview with director Kohei Oguri
• Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

[yoshimori]

This will be my first Radiance disc. The movie is a work of aesthetic genius. And Kishibe ... I'd watch a movie in which he sat alone on a park bench and read a newspaper for two hours.

[Orlac]

Not to be confused with...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDRa_KWgVdU

[zedz]

This will be my first Radiance disc. The movie is a work of aesthetic genius. And Kishibe ... I'd watch a movie in which he sat alone on a park bench and read a newspaper for two hours.

Yes, this is an amazing film. It's a bruising marital drama delivered in a style that could be flippantly (and somewhat misleadingly) described as "dark Ozu." Oguri suspends the film between a kind of hyper-realism and a minimalist, stagy irreality that jangles the nerves just as well as the score's dissonances. The two lead performances are exceptional, and again, they're pitched in a tonal no-man's land between mannered repression (a very Japanese dread of embarrassment) and raw emotionality.

In a weird sense, the film anticipates the artier end of J-Horror in its tone and shape (an inchoate source of dread infects the lives of the characters and the look of the film, and all rational means of escape are blocked), but here the monster is simple mistrust.

One of the film's most haunting and distressing techniques was its treatment of the children. They're the thing in the corner of the room you're not supposed to look at: on screen or, it often turns out, just off screen while the relationship-horror set-pieces are going down on the main stage.