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MERMAID LEGEND
1984
Director
Toshiharu Ikeda
Starring
Mari Shirato
Jun Etō
Kentarō Shimizu
Seiji Miyaguchi
Junko Miyashita
Runtime
110 minutes
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“MS. 45 by the sea.” - Justin Decloux
Elemental and mythic, MERMAID LEGEND exudes a lyrical melancholia for the dying way of life of seafaring fishermen and ama divers. Set in a coastal fishing hamlet, Toshiharu Ikeda’s eco thriller finds the incursive grasp of industrialization and corporate greed encroaching on natural realms. Migiwa (Mari Shirato), an ama diver who plunges the azure depths for abalone in the heat of summer, becomes entangled in a redevelopment scheme involving powerful local figures and yakuza when her husband is killed for witnessing a murder. Battered and left for dead, the pearl diver plans her vengeance on those who wronged her to devastating effect. Incurring a siren’s sanguinary wrath—one which can only be described as a sheer force of nature—the elegiac MERMAID LEGEND is a brooding requiem for loss, a cautionary parable for man’s true acquiescence to the natural world.
“Furious lyrical horror that shifts between its larger symbolic functions of never-ending systematic exploitation and the more direct physical actions of its main character. Ikeda has great visual imagination and the balance between the immediate violence and its larger than life retribution couldn't be better. The climax made me think of Chang Cheh's work in Shaw Bros films like VENGEANCE in its exhausting, aestheticized angry action.” - Filipe Furtado
Elemental and mythic, MERMAID LEGEND exudes a lyrical melancholia for the dying way of life of seafaring fishermen and ama divers. Set in a coastal fishing hamlet, Toshiharu Ikeda’s eco thriller finds the incursive grasp of industrialization and corporate greed encroaching on natural realms. Migiwa (Mari Shirato), an ama diver who plunges the azure depths for abalone in the heat of summer, becomes entangled in a redevelopment scheme involving powerful local figures and yakuza when her husband is killed for witnessing a murder. Battered and left for dead, the pearl diver plans her vengeance on those who wronged her to devastating effect. Incurring a siren’s sanguinary wrath—one which can only be described as a sheer force of nature—the elegiac MERMAID LEGEND is a brooding requiem for loss, a cautionary parable for man’s true acquiescence to the natural world.
“Furious lyrical horror that shifts between its larger symbolic functions of never-ending systematic exploitation and the more direct physical actions of its main character. Ikeda has great visual imagination and the balance between the immediate violence and its larger than life retribution couldn't be better. The climax made me think of Chang Cheh's work in Shaw Bros films like VENGEANCE in its exhausting, aestheticized angry action.” - Filipe Furtado