Pitfall

Pitfall (おとし穴, 1962) is Hiroshi Teshigahara's eerie Japanese mystery, available to watch online on iFILM. Work is scarce across the country. A poor miner, his small son in tow, is offered a job at a colliery and treks toward it through an abandoned coal town. On an empty road a stranger in a white suit catches up with him — and kills him without a word.

What follows refuses to behave like a normal thriller. The dead miner rises as a ghost and drifts through the deserted village, trying to work out why he was stabbed and who the man in white really was. Among the living, a scheme is unfolding: the murder looks less like chance than like a tidy plan tangled up with union rivalry, somebody's profit, and a lone witness who saw too much. The boy is left wandering the ruins among adults who have no use for him.

This was Teshigahara's feature debut, written by novelist Kōbō Abe two years before the pair made Woman in the Dunes. Toru Takemitsu's score scrapes and rattles until the empty streets feel deader still. Dressed as a detective story, it's really a parable about a working man ground down by forces he can't even see. Slow, black-and-white and deliberately unsettling — for anyone drawn to early Japanese art-house that withholds easy answers. Stream Pitfall online on iFILM.