Throne of Blood

Fog, wind, trees and mist express the ghostly paranoia of a wily, crazed Samurai bonded to Spider’s Web Castle. Director Akira Kurosawa transposed Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Japan’s Middle Ages, and with that made the fullest realisation of the play’s horror, the surging energies that no theatre stage could ever contain. Gawp as the creeping forest moves before your eyes, shiver as the spectral spirit whispers of the future while weaving, thrill at Kurosawa’s longtime collaborator, the mighty Toshiro Mifune - electrifying in battle action; crazy in close-up.

‘Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood is a graphic retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as told in feudal Japan. Although the film does not carry with it any of Shakespeare’s original words, the poetry is made up by the images, the atmosphere, the stillness, and the dreadful silence it evokes. In this way, Kurosawa has made perhaps the definitive Shakespeare film by illustrating his words through film, rather than dialogue. As far as images go, we know full well that we are in the hands of a master of mood, composition, and movement. Kurosawa is responsible for some of the greatest battle scenes and epics in film history, and this film is among his greatest accomplishments… Kurosawa creates wonderful pictorials of soldiers, and warriors in dynamic designs. His movements of each actor and extra is extraordinarily executed and planned out.’

Jeremy Robinson, Filmotomy