Vengeance Is Mine 1979

The film opens with the serial killer Iwao Enokizu being dragged into a police station, where a furious crowd and a flood of journalists press in around him. He refuses to speak, a quiet defiance that sets the tone for a story told largely through memory and misdirection. The narrative quickly shifts into a series of flashbacks that peel back the layers of his crimes and the life that shaped them.

We move to the early murders: Enokizu lures and murders two men, takes their money, and vanishes into the shadows. He travels to another city and arranges a ride with a taxi driver to an inn where a prostitute waits. Claiming to be a professor from Kyoto University, he presents himself to the innkeeper Haru, weaving a careful image of respectability as the police circulate bulletins featuring his face on television. Haru, drawn at first by the illusion of a refined professor, finds herself navigating the tension between truth and survival in a profession that demands secrecy.

A deeper backstory unfolds, tracing Enokizu’s origins to a troubled childhood. He is portrayed as a rebellious, violent youth, the son of Shizuo, a Catholic man whose fishing boats were forcibly conscripted by the Navy in the 1930s. After the war, Enokizu is convicted and imprisoned for fraud. His wife Kazuko, attracted to Shizuo, divorces him but agrees to remarry him because of his Catholic beliefs. In a stark tableau, Shizuo coldly rebuffs Kazuko during a bath and then goads a railway worker to sleep with her. When Enokizu is released from prison and suspects an affair, he accuses Kazuko of infidelity, deepening the strain of a family already wracked by suspicion and control.

The pursuit leads Enokizu to Tokyo, where he manipulates the bail money of the mother of a young defendant, then befriends a lawyer, kills him, and uses the lawyer’s apartment to conceal the victim’s body. He sends money to Haru and returns to her home, where Haru’s mother—a recently released convicted murderer—lives alongside Haru. The two women recognize the ruse but decide to keep silent, allowing Enokizu and Haru to initiate a tentative relationship. Haru’s life intersects with a benefactor who uses her as his mistress, leaving her mother and Enokizu to witness the arrangement in uneasy complicity.

As Enokizu grows certain that Haru is carrying their unborn child, the tension crescendos. He murders both Haru and her mother, pawning their belongings to cover his tracks. A former prostitute, who had seen Enokizu before, witnesses him anew and reports him to the police, bringing the net closer to him.

Five years pass, and the story closes on a stark, almost ritual image: Enokizu has been executed and cremated. His father and wife ascend to a mountaintop to scatter his ashes, but the bones refuse to settle, hanging strangely in the air as if to defy the decision to erase him.