Eros + Massacre (1969)

Eros + Massacre is the kind of cinema that feels alive on the screen—restless, intellectually daring, and visually ravishing in a way that makes you lean in rather than sit back. Yoshida braids the heat of 1920s political romance around anarchist Sakae Osugi with the cool, searching curiosity of 1960s students, creating a hypnotic conversation between eras about desire, ideology, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of freedom. It’s experimental without being random: the images have a severe beauty, the structure is bold, and the film’s questions linger long after it ends. Fair warning: it’s long, challenging, and unapologetically artful, but if you’re even slightly tempted by Japanese New Wave at its most ambitious, this is a milestone that earns its reputation.

Eros + Massacre is clearly aiming for a bold, intellectually charged portrait of radical politics and desire, cutting between Osugi’s 1920s relationships and 1960s students trying to make sense of his ideas. The problem is it often feels like it’s more interested in being provocative and “important” than in guiding you through a coherent story, so the long runtime, fragmented structure, and repetitive rhythms can turn into a slog if you’re not fully on its wavelength. If you want clean historical storytelling or emotional momentum, this will likely come off as confusing, overambitious, and occasionally pretentious. But if you’re patient with avant-garde pacing and you’re there for striking imagery and big themes rather than narrative clarity, there’s enough ambition and visual craft to justify the effort.