DOOR

The quiet life of a housewife is twisted into a violent nightmare, in one of Japan's first splatter movies. A true hidden gem, which is both intense and unsettling.

Yasuko is a housewife living with her husband and son in an urban high-rise apartment. The days when her husband is working and her son is at school are mostly calm, but she is bothered by an onslaught of door-to-door-salesmen, and spam in the form of mail and calls. When she one day slams the apartment door on the fingers of a particularly intense salesman, Yasuko becomes the target of an unbridled rage, and her once ordinary life spirals into paranoia.

DOOR is intense and unsettling, and a true hidden gem. The film premiered in 1988 but was not distributed internationally and was completely unavailable for decades. In 2022 a remastered version was shown at Tokyo International Film Festival, and it has since gone on to receive critical acclaim at several international film festivals.

Jenny Lund

Director

Banmei Takahashi (b. 1949) is a Japanese director with a long career in both pink and general film. He was given the award for Best Director at Yokohama Film Festival for the action film Tattoo (1981). Film magazine Kinema Junpo awarded him the prize for his most recent film, At the Bus Stop Until Dawn (2022).

This film is part of