Following an eleven-year documentary period, Shōhei Imamura returned to fiction with Vengeance is Mine, a serpentine thriller that reinforces his focus on the dark underbelly of everyday reality. A fictionalised portrayal of the real-life serial killer Akira Nishiguchi, whose seventy-eight-day killing spree was chronicled in a novel by Ryūzō Saki, the adaptation transposes Imamura’s fascination with this attractive middle-aged man – who appeared to have no plausible single motive for becoming a cold-blooded murderer – into a brilliantly opaque character study of the self-styled “King of the Criminals,” Iwao Enokizu, portrayed by Ken Ogata with cold, amphibian precision.

Vengeance is Mine, is at once a psychological drama, a Freudian father-son analysis, a Nippon-noir, police and criminal cache-cache, that winds throughout the distinctive Showa-period locales from pachinko parlours to flophouses and bathhouses. Flitting constantly between the present tense of Enokizu’s arrest and fragmentary vignettes from his past, the film traces Enokizu’s development as a teenager growing up under the thumb of a devoutly Catholic father on the cusp of World War II to his early adulthood amid America’s military and cultural encroachment in postwar Japan. Rather than frame Enokizu as a pin-up psychopath, Imamura presents an enigmatic figure shaped by a repressive, dogmatic cultural milieu who refused to be pinned down.