The Ballad of Narayama (1983) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by Graham ★★★★ 10

  Hang on, did he just...? With a doggy?

  Often bizarre yet eternally hopeful, The Ballad of Narayama tells of a rural place where society's elders must cease to be of this earth at the age of 70. Before Orin reaches her own use-by date, she's determined to put affairs in order and ensure that her family will be OK. As we get older, this urge to make things better for the ones we leave behind definitely gets stronger, so I could totally relate to the intent of the underlying theme.

  Winner of the '83 Cannes Palme d'Or, the film has that certain something that the Cannes people generally go all gaga over. Oodles of style, engaging characters and a great…

• Review by Justin Peterson ★★★★ 8

  (Foreign language film - Japanese)

  That's the circle of life baby!

  "No matter how hard life is here on Narayama, when the snow begins to fall she'll be released from pain."

  After spending far too long on the top of my BIG NEVER ENDING WATCHLIST, I finally checked out this very human portrait of the difficulty of life for the peasants of a remote mountain village in Japan. We get to follow the people of this village for a whole year leading up to one of their elderly members honoring the ritual of being carried up Mount Narayama to peacefully pass away.

  (Quick Hits) ... Spoilers:

  - Got to love a film that begins with shots of beautiful snowy mountains…

• Review by DNA cinephile🏳️‍🌈 ★★★★½ 3

  The Ballad of Narayama. 1983. Directed by Shohei Imamura.

  The Ballad of Narayama (1983) is a rich story of agrarian life in 19th century Japan. The screenplay is based on the novel by Shichiro Fukazawa. It explores the idea of ubasute which is the custom in a society of those who reach the age of 70, “should” be carried to the top of Mount Narayama and await their death.

  The film carefully parallels the relationship between animals, plants, and nature. There are beautiful scenes of native fauna copulating and killing each other just as the people of the village do in their practice of life. In addition, there is a silly humor that fills scenes due to the nature of…

• Review by chavel ★★★★★ 8

  A despairing masterpiece, but with a keenness for sociology one watches with morbid fascination. The Ballad of Narayama appears to be a roughhewn but tranquil depiction of nineteenth century life in the mountains of Japan where families adhere to duties to keep the community functioning, only for the film soon to reveal its shocking revelation: When an elder reaches the age of 70 in this oft-famine stricken village, their oldest son is to carry their parent to the top of the mountain in winter and abandon them until they die, as an appeasement to the gods, with the hope that a generous harvest returns to them in the spring.

  No one vocally objects to this tradition. If there is complaint…

• Review by Noah DiVincenzo ★★★★½ 4

  Imamura tackles the true meaning of our animalistic nature as humans. Not only does he tackle this concept, but he conquers it, or even masters it.
  As humans, especially we wholack wealth, we must survive. In doing so- We work as one, but we punish others when they disobey the rules according to our lifestyle . We take care of our elderly, as they’ve taken care of us. We do things that may seem hurtful to the outside world - but this is what it means to survive as animals, and as humans.
  Our emotions are what make us stand out from the rest.
  The human race is one fascinating thing- and Imamura’s film covers these pretty simple ideas , but goes about them in a convoluted manner.

  Essential Japanese film.

  
  I must check out the original.

  Watching bangers lately , I cannot complain.

• Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  Life and death. Most of the first first hour just hangs around the village, as the deadline about Orin's fate hangs over the procedural as a barbaric reminder of the cost of keep those lives going. Imamura is as usual great at establishing how his specific societies work and there's so much here going in between the mix of light and desperate scenes (that they are sometimes hard to tell apart is part of the point). Than the big scene with the family of thieves that gets buried alive arrives, one of the most horrifying uncomfortable scenes I know an the specifics of Imamura's matter of fact vision becomes clear, his simple acceptance of the laws within the village as…

• Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★ 6

  humans beings are just beasts with motive

• Review by Ben ★★★★½

  Day #11 of Japanuary!

  Continuing with the theme of watching Japanese films throughout January, I decided to watch a film directed by Shōhei Imamura today.

  The Ballad of Narayama is a powerful piece of cinema, focusing on a mother named Orin who tries to make sure that all of her children are set up to be okay after she dies. It is set in a rural village around the 19th century, and the villagers observe a practice known as "ubasute." Ubasute is a practice where an older person would be carried by a relative to a remote area and would be left there to die. The tradition in this village is that once a person turns 70 years old, they…

• Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★★ 2

  Cinematic Time Capsule1983 Marathon - Film #32

  The good news: Orin is a 69-year-old woman who’s in great health.

  The bad news: She lives in a village where anyone who reaches the age of 70 must have a relative carry them up a mountain and then be left there to die.

  Grim, gruesome and brutal, this harrowing film is packed with so many random ‘nature is cruel and uncaring cutaways’ that it feels like a Werner Herzog version of "It’s a Wonderful Life."

  And much like a Herzog film, there are several images that are going to haunt me for weeks to come.

  Sumiko Sakamoto plays the elderly Orin with such commitment that she actually had her four front…

• Review by Vince The Cinephile ★★★★ 6

  My first foray to Shōhei Imamura’s idiosyncratic cinema is the first of his two Palme d’Or-winning films, and his most widely seen film The Ballad of Narayama. Slightly remaking the 1958 Keisuke Kinoshita film (which I haven’t seen), the film explores the ancient Japanese tradition of “obasute,” in which elderly people are carried around by their children to a mountain and abandoned to die. The Ballad of Narayama is also about a microcosm of a society’s moral disintegration. Imamura probes, and digs into the crevasses of human frailty and perversion, but his focus is nonjudgmental; it’s rather more casual, incisive introspection.

  From a technical standpoint, the film is astoundingly beautiful. The winter landscape adds a grittier texture to the austerity…

• Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★

  Written and directed by Shōhei Imamura, a significant filmmaker in Japanese New Wave, The Ballad of Narayama excavates the brutality of certain traditions together with the atrocities of the mechanisms of social conformity which often implement them.

  Set in an impoverished rural Japanese village during the nineteenth century, the filmmaker provides the narrative with an enormous amount of observable recurrences as he accounts the tradition of senicide in Japan. The practice is often tied with folklore and instructs that all village residents be transmitted to a nearby mountain or similar desolate place once they reach the age of seventy and abandoned there to relinquish their life.

  The storyline evolves to refuse the more straightforward directions in examining the film's themes…

• Review by MJsays ★★★★ 2

  One thing I love about Asian cinema is that it always incorporates the animal kingdom into filmmaking better any other culture I can think of, and The Ballad of Narayama is no exception. This is a film that blends myth with tradition - which again, is another thing that Asian cinema does extremely well - and I can definitely see why this one has the reputation that it does. It’s a wonderful combination of outlandish humour and endearing drama, often making more sense in its own plain of thinking and than it does in hindsight. In this world, the mice eat the snakes. Ponder on that.