The Stranger Within a Woman

Director: Mikio Naruse

1966 / 102min / 35mm

In the penultimate year of his career, Naruse made a pair of audacious forays into noir, the first of which is this macabre chiller starring the hangdog actor Keiju Kobayashi as a man racked with guilt over the murder of his lover, and the mask-like Michiyo Aratama as his wife in whom he confides, leading her to fear for his sanity. Adapted from Edward Atiyah’s The Thin Line, which would also serve as the basis for Claude Chabrol’s later Just Before Nightfall, this exceptional Naruse film yet concerns itself with the performative contest between a man and a woman, while conjuring a spectacularly sustained mood of dry-mouthed horror with its gaunt black-and-white cinematography courtesy of Yasumichi Fukuzawa (Dodes’kaden) and its lushly dissonant score by Hikaru Hayashi (Death by Hanging).

Print courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan

Introduction by filmmaker Dan Sallitt on Sunday, June 15th