Onibaba (1964)

This is an interesting movie about fear and paranoia and what makes a person human versus an animal.

In feudal Japan a woman and her daughter-in-law make a living by killing isolated samurai and selling their armor for food. They are close to starvation and scrounging food wherever they can. The scraping and struggling they go through is well portrayed. Even without the murder, these two feel very far from human.

When a deserter arrives home and tells the women that their son / husband has died, things start to disintegrate. The daughter-in-law takes up with the deserter, each of them scratching a sexual itch that is interesting to watch. They run through the fields and fall to the ground in the tall grass just like they are in heat. Which is exactly the point. The mother becomes very concerned that her daughter-in-law will leave her for the deserter. When she kills a samurai who wears a mask, she starts to put it on in secret and hides in the field in order to frighten her daughter into returning home.

But things backfire. The mask won't come off. And when it does, she looks demonic even without it, and her daughter-in-law runs in fear. I didn't like this movie, and don't want to watch it again, but it was mesmerizing.