"Jigoku" begins surrealistically enough, with artfully draped nude women in a chiaroscuro setting, bringing to mind some of the stylish and gritty Yakuza films of the '60s. Expectations of "Jigoku" continuing in that vein are quickly eroded, along with any semblance of logic to the plot. If you're reading a review that contains spoilers, I'll presume that either you've already watched it or have little interest in doing so, so a brief outline is worthwhile: Shiro is a university student who is engaged to a young woman. He's also an acquaintance (seemingly uncomfortably so) of Tamura, a thoroughly unsavory young man who seems to have some hold over Shiro, and be privy to incriminating secrets others hold. Tamura gives Shiro a ride one night, and Shiro asks him to take an alternate route, with unpleasant results: a drunken Yakuza, staggering down the darkened road, is (slowly) struck by Tamura's car, eventually killing him. Despite Shiro's protests that they should stop to help, Tamura drives on. The man's mother sees the accident and notes the license plate number. She vows to the man's widow, that they shall take revenge.
Here's where the story takes a sharp turn from realism. Shiro, seized with guilt for his complicity in the drunken Yakuza's death (which consisted entirely of suggesting the route they took), wants to make a clean breast of it, but Tamura refuses, setting in motion what becomes a Buddhist story of guilt and punishment, both here and in the afterlife. Every person they encounter, it seems, has been responsible for the death of another...except, of course, Shiro who bore no such responsibility, having been nothing more than a passenger. And yet, despite his innocence and his mostly ethical impulses, he neither tries to defend himself, nor protest the injustice of his punishment. He's entirely passive; the most energetic thing he does is to shout various people's names at different points. (What is it with the Japanese shouting people's names?! Has it ever helped a character's situation in a film, much less in real life? If so, I've never seen it.)
The story slows down to a crawl, with everyone dying and going to hell, whether or not they did anything wrong. And the methods through which they die are so improbable as to be farcical. High up on a suspension bridge, two bad people accidentally fall to their deaths -- despite a clearly visible grid of cables stretching like guardrails on both sides. Someone falls down one flight of stairs onto the tatami mat floor; apparently, a fatal end. A dozen old people die from eating little fish, caught that day, which have supposedly gone rancid. I couldn't help but think of the scene in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life", where Death kills all of the members of a dinner party through tinned salmon, used in the mousse. The rest of the plodding story is set in the Buddhist conception of hell, and is played essentially straight from that dogma. Physical punishment is graphically meted out, with gratuitous eye-gouging, flaying and other sadistic punishments, shown for their shock value rather than for our edification. Shiro calls out for his daughter, floating off (to what fate?) on a lotus leaf -- as if shouting her name would do either of them any good. Never mind the fact that, in the story, she was only a few month-old fetus. Here, she's at least a month old baby. Go figure.
"Jigoku" contains some stunning cinematography, bits of a very good jazz score, impressive flourishes of color and other charms, but they are unable to save it from the plodding, illogical cautionary tale it becomes.
