Kiki Sugino/ Japan/ 2016/ 96 mins
Part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival
Snow Woman begins with a hunter, Minokichi (Munetaka Aoki) and his mentor encountering the titular spirit during a snowstorm. Her frostbite-inducing breath kills the mentor, but spares the hunter. He later meets the mysterious Yuki (Kiki Sugino), who resembles the snow woman and marries her. But the supernatural world haunts them, and spirits and superstition eventually impact on their rural idyll.
Director and star Sugino initially provides this much-told tale, a legendary Japanese ghost story previously depicted in 1965’s Kwaidan, with an eerie atmosphere. The film’s monochrome opening establishes the snow woman’s powers in a subtly creepy fashion, focusing as much on the stark, snow-covered surroundings as on the snow woman’s attack. The snow woman’s later appearances alternate between both the surrealistic, with her entrapment of a young boy bathed in a cold blue tint, and more naturalistic, such as her climactic encounter with Minokichi’s elderly mother that more resembles a form of euthanasia.
However, Sugino mostly eschews the overt horror trappings of earlier J-Horror works such as Ringu and Ju On: The Grudge, instead placing greater emphasis on the relationship between Minokichi and Yuki, as well as the effect the woman’s attacks have on the village in which they live. Sugino uses this emphasis as an opportunity to show the daily life in the village, where both Minokichi and his daughter Ume (Mayu Yamaguchi) are the subject of suspicious comments from co-workers and pupils regarding their relationship with the snow woman. The snow woman’s attacks are also filmed with a lack of visceral gore that may disappoint horror fans, but instead make her appear to be an ambiguous figure that perhaps serves to release others from the pain they are suffering.
Snow Woman is a unique retelling of a tale that in less creative hands could have been a simplistic horror film. A story that places characterisation and atmosphere over cheap scares.