Woman in the Dunes (1964)
An entomologist on vacation is trapped by local villagers into living with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them. (NR, 147 min.)
Showtimes
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
(TBD)
One of the sixties' great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic worldview of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eiji Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle, for which Teshigahara received an Academy Award nomination for best director. [Janus]
Starring: Eiji Okada, Kyôko Kishida, Kôji Mitsui
Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Language: Japanese
Genre: Drama, Thriller
"This is hypnotic, emotionally wrenching filmmaking."
— Staff, Empire Magazine
"Teshigahara's film is a tour de force of visual style, and a knockout as an unusually cruel thriller."
— Tony Rayns, Time Out
"Hiroshi Teshigahara crafts a spare and haunting allegory for human existence in Woman in the Dunes."
— Acquarello, Strictly Film School
"In stunningly composed images by Teshigahara and cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa, that eroticism becomes overwhelming."
— Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
"The camera work by Hiroshi Segawa is often extraordinary in its ability to make a sheet of sand something mysterious and wonderful."
— William J. Nazzaro, Arizona Republic
"Woman in the Dunes remains a masterpiece, a timeless contemplation of life's essential mystery and a triumph of bold, innovative style."
— Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
"Teshigahara's creative background was in Japan's avant-garde arts scene, and there's a powerful expressiveness to the film's black-and-white cinematography."
— Tom Dawson, BBC.com
"More than almost any other film I can think of, Woman in the Dunes' uses visuals to create a tangible texture -- of sand, of skin, of water seeping into sand and changing its nature."
— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"The couple's grimly inescapable dilemma becomes hugely complex and terrifyingly resonant -- a sexualised version of the Sisyphus myth, recounted with a distinct touch of Buuelian absurdism."
— Jonathan Romney, Independent on Sunday
"A bizarre film, distinguished not so much by Kobo Abe's rather obvious screenplay as by Teshigahara's arresting visual style of extreme depth of focus, immaculate detail, and graceful eroticism."
— Don Druker, Chicago Reader
"The feature film Woman in the Dunes, his 1964 collaboration with novelist-playwright-scenarist Kobo Abe, stands at the high point of [Teshigahara's] filmmaking career and constitutes the most eloquent of his several works with Abe. Using the textures of his pottery and the grand scale of his floral constructions, Teshigahara brings to Abe's text the full force of his nonverbal artistry of chiaroscuro, of shapes and surfaces, of speed and languor."
— Audie Bock, Criterion
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