Synopsis
The Lower Depths (どん底, 1957) is an Akira Kurosawa drama you can watch online on iFILM. Kurosawa took Maxim Gorky's stage play and moved it out of czarist Russia into the slums of Edo — old Tokyo in the dying days of the feudal era. The setting shifts; the gutter stays the gutter.
A collapsing tenement houses people with nowhere left to fall: a drunk actor, a ruined samurai, a peddler, a dying wife, a thief. A wandering old man drifts in and starts soothing each of them with gentle lies about a better life waiting somewhere. Sutekichi, the thief played by Toshiro Mifune, drops his affair with the landlady Osugi for her younger sister Okayo — and Osugi's jealousy lights the fuse that blows the old man's comforting stories apart. Almost everything plays out inside one cramped room, and Kurosawa turns that confinement into pressure with no exit.
Shot in tight, stage-like quarters yet cut with the restless precision people keep coming back to Kurosawa for, the film pairs Mifune with Isuzu Yamada — the same actress who played his Lady Macbeth in Throne of Blood that very year. It's bleak, unsparing work about people stripped of hope and the price of false comfort. Not an easy night in, but essential for anyone drawn to classic Japanese drama. Stream The Lower Depths (1957) online on iFILM.
Starring
Recommendations
Comments 0