Vengeance Is Mine
Director: Shohei Imamura
Year Released: 1979
Rating: 3.5
A captured killer goes over his story with the police, telling them of his pursuit of pleasure and unstoppable bloodlust. There's a lot to like here, especially in its examination of societal impositions on animal desires (that whole Freudian 'civilization and its discontents' business) and the cracks in the human psyche, but it also finds itself distracted quite often, drifting off course by paying a decent amount of attention to tangential details or leaping forward in time and disrupting the flow. It's troubled - and troubling - but also fascinating in its idiosyncratic assembly, and the refusal to resort to a lot of easy psychology to explain the killing spree is refreshing.
