It was here that Kurosawa Kiyoshi's distinctive approach to genre film fully bloomed, an oblique form of horror that unsettles precisely for how much exists outside the frame as much as what lies within it.

an increasingly hallucinatory piece where murderousness is a disease spreading rapidly through the susceptible Japanese psyche.

It's unsatisfying as a story precisely because it aspires to create a mounting sense of dread by enlarging questions rather than answering them.

Like an unsettled mind, this is littered with background disturbances...