Review of Woman in the Dunes / 砂の女, directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

I have a very distinct memory back in high school when we read the novel The Woman in the Dunes. I didn’t think at the time I was going to remember this book so vividly, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately because it was the only book from East Asia, or Asia in general (I’m not including Russia here when I make that statement) that I ever read before college for school.

Which makes it quite the anomaly. At the time it seemed unremarkable for my tired teenage brain that hated English class (which was ironic, as I went to an art high school for its writing program—I hated the English classes though), but now here I am ruminating about it at the age of twenty-five over a decade later.

I decided to watch the movie version of the book to see what the deal was, and because I had watched Hiroshima mon amour around the same time and was smitten with the male actor. He’s the male lead in this movie as well. I found the film on Darkroom, signed up for an account, and was ready to have a blast.

Let’s get into the review! This movie is quite the wild ride, that’s for sure.

A man obsessed with bugs is trapped at the bottom of a sand dune with a woman by the local villagers.

Our main character in this movie is Niki Junpei, a schoolteacher with a fondness for bugs. He lives and works in Tokyo, but at the start of the movie, he decides to leave the city and go find tiger beetles out in the wild, as he’s also pretty dissatisfied with his life in the city anyways. He’s not the most pleasant person to be around.

When he’s out in the rural part of Japan, looking for his precious beetles, he misses the last train back to Tokyo. He runs into some villagers who tell him to come back to their homes, and they show him a sand dune with a ladder to the bottom. He climbs down the ladder and finds a young woman living in the home at the bottom of the dune, with the only way in or out being the ladder.

She’s going to host him that night, and he discovers that she lost her daughter and husband to the sand. She tells him about how the sand is always encroaching on the house, and that if she stops shoveling it, she’s going to be buried alive in it. Once they eat dinner together, she goes out and shovels sand into buckets. These are then given to the villagers at the top of the dune.

She tells him he is a guest and doesn’t need to shovel on the first day with her, which is when we begin realizing he’s not leaving this dune, especially as someone calls him the new help. The very next morning the ladder is gone, trapping him with the woman and no way to escape. Turns out that the villagers sell the sand to cement companies, and they now want him to help her as a form of slavery.

If they don’t shovel the sand, then the villagers won’t give them food or water, basically forcing them to keep going and provide for the village. While Junpei is resistant at first, the woman doesn’t really seem to care anymore about her situation, even though the sand they’re shoveling is crappy quality and won’t make good cement anyways. He starts shoveling as the sand approaches.

The days pass, and Junpei and the woman start having sex and being intimate with each other. He doesn’t give up his dream of getting out of there and plots ways to force his way out of the dune, including making a DIY grapple hook. When he does escape with that, the villagers find and begin chasing after him. He gets stuck in quicksand and they rescue him, but then the villagers take him right back to the sand dune.

After that, he starts giving up himself, but then begs the villagers to show him the sea. They tell him they can do that if he has sex with the woman while they’re watching. He agrees for his own selfish reasons, even though the woman refuses to do it. He then attempts to sexually assault her as they watch, but she fends him off.

Things change after that as Junpei discovers a way to get water out of the sand one night. The woman, who is pregnant, has complications that might kill her, so the villagers take her out and bring her to a doctor. They forget the rope ladder and Junpei easily climbs out, now free. However, he then goes back into the dunes and contemplates his method of drawing out water, deciding that he can show the villagers what he has created.

The film then ends with a report from the police about Junpei’s disappearance; it has been seven years since he has last been seen.

Overall Thoughts

I will have to say, as someone who did not really remember any erotic scenes in the book, only that they were expected to become lovers with each other and did, I had my mouth open at this movie’s scenes. I could also kind of tell this was a Japanese movie that came from a very specific period, but it certainly is a masterpiece in my mind.

I could see how someone who isn’t into film as an art form or might not like the literary/philosophical musings of this movie particularly, but I had a lot of fun watching this movie and breaking it down. It was an interesting contrast as well coming straight off of Hiroshima mon amour, which is a completely different kind of movie (although it, too, is quite philosophical).

All in all: I do think this is one of my favorite Japanese movies I’ve watched recently. I’ve been on such a kick for Japanese film and dramas all of the sudden. I think in the past year my top favorite has been the movie Monster, which I watched on a flight to Korea back in June 2024.

Go watch this one though if you have the chance! I think anyone interested in film like this should be watching movies like these whenever they get the opportunity. You can learn a lot from the classics.

Follow me below on Instagram, Letterboxd, and Goodreads for more.