The second film in Noboru Tanaka’s “Showa Era Trilogy,” WATCHER IN THE ATTIC is an adaption of a short story by seminal Japanese novelist Edogawa Rampo. Starring Junko Miyashita (the second “Queen” of Nikkatsu’s Roman porno series) as Lady Minako, owner of a shabby boarding house in 1920s Tokyo, the film is a deviously grotesque and unapologetically voyeuristic tale of murder, deceit and forbidden love between the bizarre cast of characters living within it.
When one of the tenants, Goda (Renji Ishibashi), secretly witnesses Lady Minako perform a truly heinous act while spying on her through one of his attic peepholes, he is overcome with desire and devises a murderous plot in order to demonstrate his love for her. Psychologically unbalanced, hauntingly atmospheric and ruthlessly erotic, WATCHER IN THE ATTIC is an “unsettling exploration of loneliness and obsession whose final moment serves as a perfect coda for the events that have unfolded” (10k Bullets).
“Tanaka’s artistic treatment of voyeurism, decadence and grotesque sexuality, along with the absurd surrealism surrounding the protagonists, results in something genuinely unusual.” –Asian Movie Pulse
DIRECTED BY NOBORU TANAKA
JAPAN | 1976 | JAPANESE WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
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