Vengeance is Mine movie review (1980)
The film is by Shohei Imamura (1926-2006), considered with such as Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi among the greatest Japanese directors. He was once named an entomologist by a French critic, and not just because of his famous film "The Insect Woman" (1963), which regarded a prostitute as prey in an unthinking, deadly world. His killer Enokizu is also like an insect, doing what he does because it is what he does. We realize how much we desire such stories to explain their evil, and what resolve it takes a storyteller to deny us.
In a pre-title sequence, we see Enokizu in the back seat of a police car, after his capture. He had been the subject of a national manhunt for 78 days, his photograph everywhere, and yet he looked so anonymous with his regular features, his glasses, his hat and overcoat that even when people thought they recognized him, they doubted themselves. Enokizu sings in the police car, speculates on the date of his hanging, refuses to go along with the questions of the police. His theory: He committed the crimes, he deserves to die, everything is as it should be.
After the titles, Imamura shows us the first murders. Enokizu hitches a ride with two truck drivers, makes up a story about gambling, leads one to a wooded hillside near railroad tracks and stabs him to death. The murder is committed with great difficulty, the victim struggling desperately, the killer almost overcome, blood everywhere. He leads the second man to the same area, and kills him, too. He washes up and changes, cool and impassive.
The film will indicate all of his murders, but only once again in such detail; like Hitchcock in "Frenzy," Imamura knows that once you bring violence onto the screen, it can later be more effective simply to evoke its memory. There is an interlude in which Enokizu poses as a bail bondsman, befriends the family of a man in court, separates the mother from her daughter, and obtains all of the cash she brought for bail; he does it smoothly, as throughout the film, he is able to improvise, disguise himself, successfully pose as a lawyer or professor. With another victim, an old lawyer, he befriends him, then murders him, seals him into a cabinet, makes himself at home in the man's apartment and then flies into a frenzy when he cannot find the can opener. He was not angry with his victim, but the can opener makes him furious because it cannot be killed.
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