I Would Like to See It: Throne of Blood

No one shoots a crowd like Kurosawa. Throughout Throne of Blood, loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, rooms and courtyards full of men fairly seethe with mass emotion. Whole formations of soldiers recoiling in fear as Lord Washizu (Toshiro Mifune, his dashing good looks rendered harsh by Noh-inspired makeup intended to make him seem more villainous) barrels through their midst. Ranked courtiers fall over themselves in terror at his wild behavior during a state banquet. The forest spirit (Chieko Naniwa) which prophesies Washizu’s ascent to power makes reference to “mountains of corpses” left in the Great Lord’s wake, but the film is packed with mountains of the living, outsize arrays of unnamed characters whose reactions frame and accent the performances of Throne of Blood’s leads.

As Washizu Asaji — the film’s reimagined Lady Macbeth — Isuzu Yamada is profoundly unsettling, her traditional cosmetics (blackened teeth, shaved eyebrows sketched in charcoal) and shapeless costume giving her the appearance of a larva or caterpillar, an impression reinforced by the tiny, mincing steps decorum and the practicalities of her clothing demand she take and by her slow, low-affect way of speaking. In a film so concerned with spiders and their weaving she is fittingly enough a kind of silkworm, able to spin the same substance but incapable of working with it as the spider does, of devouring the prey such silk can catch. Watching her dissolve in the cocoon of her own paranoid ambition is one of the film’s ugliest spectacles.

And speaking of spectacles, Throne of Blood’s sets are perhaps its single most exciting element, from the primordial gloom of Spider’s Web forest to the mist-shrouded battlements of the castle of the same name. Still, none of it can equal the chamber in a remote garrison where a rebellious lord took his own life after his vanquisher denied him mercy. The walls and floor are splashed with impossible to remove blood stains that with their coronas of crystallized salt and varied depths of color evoke not just carnage but the bleeding of the earth itself, as though someone had cut into a geode and the rock spurted gore in all directions. It is a near-supernatural omen which Washizu and his wife, too easily seduced by the empty dream of conquest and sovereignty, do not so much as remark upon.