Vibe
Vengeance Is Mine opens with the killer already caught, removing the usual suspense of whether police will find him. Shōhei Imamura is interested instead in the opaque social and psychological terrain around Iwao Enokizu, a fictionalized serial murderer played by Ken Ogata. The film jumps through time, revisiting fraud, murder, family conflict, sex, religion, concealment, and the long period in which Enokizu moves through Japanese society under assumed identities. Chronology does not produce explanation. Every flashback adds information while the man at the center remains resistant to a single motive. Imamura surrounds him with damaged relationships: a devout Catholic father, a wife caught in fraught family dynamics, innkeepers and lovers whose own desires complicate moral judgment. Violence erupts brutally, but the film's larger discomfort comes from how easily Enokizu can pass through ordinary institutions and social encounters. He is not rendered as a supernatural monster. He eats, jokes, lies, seduces, imitates respectability, and exploits expectations. The title's biblical phrase promises moral accounting, yet Imamura keeps exposing the inadequacy of simple categories such as revenge, evil, guilt, or punishment.
Watch for
- Watch the chronology carefully. Imamura gives dates and returns to earlier events, but temporal precision contrasts with continuing uncertainty about why Enokizu acts as he does.
- Notice Ken Ogata's shifts in social performance. Enokizu can appear deferential, educated, comic, threatening, or intimate depending on what a situation rewards, making identity feel tactical rather than stable.
- Track the father's Catholic faith and the title's religious language. Imamura places formal morality beside desires and resentments the family cannot contain, preventing religion from becoming an easy explanatory key.
- Pay attention to environments Enokizu moves through—trains, inns, homes, offices, roads. The film's unease comes partly from showing murder embedded in recognizable social Japan rather than isolated exceptional spaces.
Production notes
Criterion dates Vengeance Is Mine to 1979 and identifies Ryūzō Saki's nonfiction-based source as the foundation for Imamura's treatment of a real postwar murder case. Ken Ogata plays the fictionalized killer in a performance that became one of the actor's defining roles. Imamura had spent much of the 1970s working in documentary and television after contraction of the studio system, and his return to major fiction filmmaking carried that investigative sensibility with it. Criterion's interview material describes his approach in quasi-detective terms: research accumulates around behavior without necessarily delivering psychological essence. That method shapes the fractured chronology. Instead of building a conventional cause-and-effect origin story, Imamura rearranges the case so motives remain unstable even as facts become clearer. The production also belongs to the director's long interest in sexuality, marginality, family, and what he regarded as the less respectable layers of Japanese social life. Where some crime films turn the killer into a charismatic antihero, Imamura keeps Enokizu charismatic enough to be socially plausible but too elusive for identification to become comfortable. The 140-minute scale lets the film become a social panorama rather than a narrow manhunt.
Trivia
- Criterion describes the story as based on a notorious Japanese murder case and on Ryūzō Saki's nonfiction-derived source.
- The film begins after Enokizu's arrest, deliberately removing the basic 'will he be caught?' structure from the crime narrative.
- Ken Ogata's performance became one of the central roles of his career and preceded further major collaboration with Imamura, including The Ballad of Narayama.
- Imamura returned to large-scale fiction filmmaking with Vengeance Is Mine after a substantial period devoted to documentary and television work.
- Kinema Junpo's all-time polls later placed the film #26 in 1999 and #34 in 2009, making it one of Imamura's strongest domestic consensus titles.
Legacy
Vengeance Is Mine became a landmark in Japanese true-crime cinema because it refuses the explanatory satisfactions the genre often promises. The killer is caught, his biography is available, social context is extensive, and still the accumulation of facts does not stabilize him. That skepticism influenced later crime films interested in the limits of profiling and motive. It also marks an important stage in Imamura's career. The filmmaker who had dissected postwar sexuality and social margins in the 1960s returned from nonfiction work with a style capable of combining documentary curiosity, star performance, and large-scale narrative. Internationally, later Palme d'Or victories made Imamura easier to place within auteur history, but domestic polls show Vengeance Is Mine holding unusually strong long-term status. It represents a 1970s Japanese cinema neither reducible to studio decline nor to exploitation cycles. The film's religious title, violent subject, and black humor create an unstable moral field in which institutions can punish acts without fully understanding the person who committed them. At #36, it anchors Imamura's late-1970s return and gives the historical list a crime film whose greatness comes from refusing to turn violence into a solvable psychological puzzle.