directed by Nobuo Nakagawa
Japan
99 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I have returned from my hiatus to kick off the spooky season with a film that I could superlatively describe with an awful pun1 but am consciously choosing not to.
I happen to be in the middle of reading The Penguin Book of Hell at the moment, and that combined with my overall interest in religious studies makes for a mindset that is intensely receptive of everything Jigoku lays on its viewers. Something that I think any secular observer (and probably a good deal of non-secular observers) will begin to notice once they've been exposed to enough visions of various religions' underworlds is that after a while it really feels like concepts of an afterlife full of torment say more about the god or gods who created such a place than they do about the people who have been sentenced to live in them for eternity.
Case in point: the main character of Jigoku, Shiro Shimizu (played by Shigeru Amachi). An extremely normal person, guilty of essentially nothing by his own hand and by the standards of today's society, who ends up damned to hell alongside a crowd of his family, friends, and vague acquaintances, all of whom are objectively more "sinful" than him. Things seem to go very wrong whenever Shimizu is around, but again, none of it is his fault: his first "crime" is simply being the passenger during a hit-and-run that ends up claiming the life of a supposedly big-cheese yakuza, whose girlfriend and mother immediately begin plotting revenge not just on Tamura (we'll get to him in a moment - oh, boy, will we ever), the man driving the car, but on Shimizu, who happened to be in that place at that time because he wanted to take a different route than Tamura did.
Very shortly after the first car accident, before Shimizu has really had time to recover, he finds himself in another accident that ends up taking the life of his fiancée, Yukiko (the lovely Utako Mitsuya). Again, it is not directly his fault, but he is in the situation because he insisted on taking a taxi when Yukiko wanted to walk. He could justifiably walk away from both incidents carrying no blame whatsoever, but instead he chooses to take the burden on himself - therefore damning himself even before his death to a life in which he deems himself a murderer.
While Shimizu is the protagonist, arguably the most fascinating character in Jigoku is Shimizu's "friend" Tamura (Yōichi Numata). Every time I rewatch this, I spend the entire movie wondering if Tamura was ever human at all. He shows up out of nowhere accompanied by a sound (whether diegetic or not is hard to tell) like an onrushing train and seems to goad Shimizu further into believing life is nothing but sin and degeneration until you inevitably die and suffer for all eternity. He revels in others' suffering, and is oftentimes the cause of it: Tamura is the one who should logically be held accountable for the first accident, but instead he ropes Shimizu into sharing the blame, and later snipes at him for trying to "sell him out" - as if he is not the one actually culpable for a crime. We don't ever find anything out about Tamura as a person: where he's from, why he's attracted to Shimizu, what his overall problem is. Even Shimizu wonders "who is this guy?" at one point. When Tamura dies, he's no less of a bizarre psychopomp - he is, in fact, more of one. Numata's sudden shift into full kabuki actor mode when Tamura visits Shimizu in hell (only to be chastised by a force even more evil than himself, leading one to believe that Tamura was perhaps human all along) is one of my favorite moments in the latter part of the film.
The world is faintly hellish even while Shimizu is still alive. The disquieting atmosphere is so similar to Nakagawa's later film Yotsuya Kaidan that I looked up the cinematographer for Jigoku, expecting to see them credited for that film as well, only to find that Yotsuya Kaidan and Jigoku share no crew members aside from composer Chumei Watanabe. I think the nightmarish imagery is largely carried by both Nakagawa and art director Haruyasu Kurosawa, who worked on numerous other horror movies, but Watanabe's score certainly does a lot to help the sense of a deeply haunted world that we feel while watching the film as well.
So, arguably, the most horrifying thing about Jigoku is not the elaborately staged underworld scenes, featuring people being flayed, decapitated, boiled, reduced to skeletons, bashed in the teeth with hammers &c, it's the fact that, like, there's a baby down there, dude. If Shimizu can get damned not only by himself but along with his girlfriend, his unborn child, his sister, and his parents for things that he was both not really guilty of and in one case was not even aware he was doing - if there are gods who will damn a baby to eternal torment to that - then those gods are infinitely more frightening than the demons bashing people's teeth in with hammers. And maybe even more frightening than that is the idea that maybe Shiro only went there because he felt like he deserved to be there.
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1 It is, in point of fact, one hell of a movie.
