Vengeance Is Mine

The matter-of-fact way in which the sociopathic antihero of this film goes about his business is startling. Even more unsettling is the fact that the story ultimately offers no characters to respect or sympathize with; even the protagonist's father, who is first presented as a man of strong moral conviction, confesses his secret sin in the end. The final scene is completely engimatic; it's beyond ambiguous, venturing into something more like nihilism.
But Imamura is a highly gifted filmmaker; sometimes I get the feeling that I would understand his films much more if I was more familiar with recent Japanese history and culture. As it is I can always appreciate the formal elegance of his style in The Pornographers and Ballad of Narayama even when the obscurity of the themes in those films leaves me in the cold.
One of the virtuoso moments in "Vengeance Is Mine" is the early scene in which Ken Ogata's character murders the two men. The word "gritty" is thrown around a lot when describing films like Reservoir Dogs and Straw Dogs, but nothing I've seen before has been quite as raw and disturbing as the prolonged stabbing that closes out the scene. The murder sequence also has a perversely funny moment, when Ogata, immediately after killing the first man, goes to a nearby convenience store and buys a knife which he plans to use on the other guy.