In the hands of Akira Kurosawa, Shakespeare’s Macbeth becomes a tale of fog and blood. Mist rolls across the hills and through the forest, while the stains in a room where a suicide took place cannot be scrubbed away. That last detail is an extension, of course, of Lady Macbeth’s infamous cry of “Out, damned spot!” Her counterpart here is one of the Throne of Blood’s eerier elements: a still, pallid Lady Asaji (Isuzu Yamada), who is almost as unearthly as the glowing spirit (Chieko Naniwa) that the Macbeth analogue, Washizu (Toshiro Mifune), encounters in the woods. As a narrative, Throne of Blood easily translates Shakespeare to feudal Japan, though it’s curious how the filmmaking is less taut than in something like Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, which he had made a few years earlier.
(7/3/2025)
