Banmei Takahashi – Doa AKA Door (1988)
Tokyo housewife Yasuko Honda (Keiko Takahashi, the director’s wife) has a workaholic husband named Saturo (Shirô Shimomoto) who has been called away for out-of-town duty for a few days, so she is home alone with her elementary-school–age son Takuto (Takuto Yonezu). Already fed up with the frequent intrusions of door-to-door salesmen, because of whom she keeps her door locked and latched, she is highly frustrated when salesman Yamakawa (Daijirô Tsutsumi) slips his hand through her chained door to offer a brochure. She slams the door on his hand, instantly making an enemy of the man, who becomes bent on revenge.
From that simple set-up, Banmei Takahashi — who cowrote the screenplay with Ataru Oikawa — delivers a master class in suspense, as Yamakawa begins a mission of payback that grows increasingly deadly. One scene that is an early-on example of the rising tension of the film begins with Takuto witnessing the front door handle quietly moving up and down after Yasuko asks him to fetch the newspaper from the mail slot. This situation builds into a tug-of-war power display over the newspaper between Yasuko and Yamakawa.
Banmei Takahashi does a marvelous job with framing. A beautifully shot chase scene within the Honda’s apartment is shot from overhead, which simultaneously plays with viewers’ willing suspension of disbelief while heightening the tension as we watch the action unfold without a ceiling but with door and wall frames exposed to us. Plenty of the red stuff is on display, along with a sudden shot that — by my estimation — needed to be filmed in black-and-white at the time because of the gore on display. Cinematographer Yasushi Sasakibara does a brilliant job of capturing those scenes and others, including bringing viewers uncomfortably close to the proceedings in some instances.
An added element of fun is seeing the technology that was cutting-edge in 1988 but is charmingly quaint viewed with 2023 eyes. One such piece of equipment is a rather sizable tabletop television remote control that I had never seen before but that may have been popular in Japan back in the day.
Doa AKA Door - 1988 - Banmei Takahashi.mkv General Container: Matroska Runtime: 1 h 33 min Size: 2.72 GiB Video Codec: x264 Resolution: 1024x552 Aspect ratio: 1.85:1 Frame rate: 23.976 fps Bit rate: 3 249 kb/s BPP: 0.240 Audio #1: Japanese 2.0ch FLAC @ 457 kb/s #2: English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s (Commentary with Jasper Sharp)
https://nitro.download/view/9024DA0B3DCF143/Doa_AKA_Door_-_1988_-_Banmei_Takahashi.mkv
Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English
