The Sting of Death

More than any other form of art, movies excel at making the viewer uncomfortable.  Perhaps it’s the voyeuristic nature of the medium itself, intruding on personal tragedies with that unflinching cinematic lens.  Ingmar Bergman made a career of putting the viewer through emotional hell and existential horror…yet kept them coming back for more.  Kohei Oguri’s The Sting of Death (1990) is a spiritual successor to Bergman’s masochistic tendencies in many ways; a painful slice-of-life focused on the marital crisis between two people desperate for something to live for…or something to die for.

Upon discovering her husband’s infidelity, Miho (Keiko Matsuzaka) takes great pleasure in emotionally abusing Toshio (Ittoku Kishibe) with constant reminders of his moral failure. Her passive-aggressive behavior turns their family unit into an ongoing battleground, where every happy moment is balanced by unexpected cruelty.  Toshio attempts to make amends but finds himself drawn into this unstable mental landscape of paranoia and regret.

 

The Sting of Death is enveloped in the angst of post-war Japan, a country now rudderless and adrift after questioning the duties and loyalties of life under failed Imperial rule. As a former kamikaze pilot, Toshio is already failure simply for surviving (a theme ironically played out in the new Godzilla film as well) and brings that weakness home to his family.  Meanwhile, Miho is unsure exactly how the balance of power should look, not content to merely buy clothes and raise children. As a metaphor for the spiritual ennui lurking on the edges of the emerging modern Japan, it’s terrifying.  And Oguri leans into that horror with an unsettling soundtrack that amplifies the menace.

 

And like much of the work of Ingmar Bergman, it’s not a pleasant film to sit through, despite the often-striking cinematography and shot compositions.  Oguri roots his camera to the ground, forcing the viewer to watch every painful scene play out no matter how much they want to look away.  Yet underneath all this melancholy is a conflicted message that finds Toshio and Mohi together in the end, more content being miserable together than they would be apart, the outside world nothing more than a dangerous abstraction. It may not be a happy ending, but, as the film seems to suggest, we should take what we can get.  

 

Radiance gives The Sting of Death its Blu-ray world premiere in a 3000-copy limited edition featuring an hour-long documentary on the Japanese film renaissance of the 1990s, an interview with film scholar Hideki Maeda and a set of insert liner notes.

 

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