Labyrinth of Dreams

Ishii's thriller, as oneiric in its way as Angel Dust and August in the Water were, updates a story by novelist maudit Kyusaku Yumeno to the monochrome 1950s. The virginal Tomiko (Komine) is a bus conductor in a small country town who grows convinced that the handsome new driver of her bus (Asano) is the man who loved and murdered her friend in another town. She steels herself to work with him, testing him at every opportunity. And then she falls in love. A Freudian fable of the night, filled with moons, rain, dark tunnels and imminent collisions. As Tomiko matures from repressed adolescence into womanhood the key question is less whether the man's a murderer, but whether it's possible for a man to murder with sincerity.