The Snow Woman

The striking Shiho Fujimura stars as The Snow Woman, a gliding wraith that stalks the frigid depths of a feudal forest, freezing elderly snoopers when they dare to bed down in abandoned cabins for the night. Rather than hold this supernatural character at arm's length, director Tokuzō Tanaka's film (clocking in at a concise 79 minutes), welcomes her into the household; describing her pained attempts to maintain a consistent emotional presence in the human realm. Beautifully shot by Chikashi Makiura, The Snow Woman largely elides location work, and any verisimilitude such a practice can confer, preferring to stage its spontaneous blizzards on a succession of cramped, delicately lit sound stages. This beatific falseness reflective of a central character who works extremely hard to maintain their own staged, and temporary, reality. 

Besotted with the apprentice sculptor who wandered into her chilly domain, Fujimura's Snow Woman disguises herself as a beautiful, ageless woman and quickly ingratiates herself with the widow of the man she flash-froze, all to win her beloved's heart. Based on a folk tale included in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaiden: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, the spell of The Snow Woman is that this paranormal presence is, essentially, both sympathetic and, unless threatened, benign; a lonely creature that really only represents an aspect of nature that just so happens to be associated with death. Yuki, as she is known to her husband, simply wants to be in love and raise a family. The outside forces determined to degrade or undermine this partnership then seethe with jealousy: the brutish local lord who wants The Snow Woman for himself or the ancient medicine woman who blisters Yuki's pearlescent skin with boiling, ceremonial waters.