A Fugitive from the Past (1965) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½ 2

  For a three-hour-long movie that some have deemed one of the greatest movies in Japanese cinema, this one felt a bit underwhelming and not epic at all. In fact, literally the last hour or so is the detectives figuring out and explaining how the bad guy committed the crime, which I would argue could have easily been trimmed down.

  That being said, I’d have to give it to this movie; I don’t think I was completely bored. Perhaps not as fully invested as I was hoping, but never properly bored. The performances by everyone are great, especially Mikuni in his “dual” role, conveying much of the slimy and guilt of the character through dialogue delivery and physical performance. Uchida pulls…

• Review by Jerry ★★★★½ 8

  We are creatures of climate, not only the one we exist amidst, but that which warms and cools and rests and rages within. Some storms leave behind a kind of turmoil that is never forgotten, no matter how much gets rebuilt, and despite best efforts to move on, particles of a dark, typhonic past have a tendency to outlast our memory thereof. In these storms most intemperate, wherein effulgent fires ragelike scorned gods on high, we hope and pray for the ashes left behind to be carried oceanward by the zephyrs of time, but those most bemoaned by such events will hold on to those extinguished embers as evidence of your former inclement self. We may try and sometimes succeed in forgetting, but the sun and the sea, with their eternal recall, will one day reclaim what they are owed.

• Review by Anurag Kashyap ★★★★★

  The first foreign language film I saw

• Review by edgard713 ★★★★½

  No matter how hard some try to not be defined by their past mistakes, the burden of guilt/shame will bog them down... Incredible watch!! One of the greatest Japanese crime films no doubt. I must say tho... aroused by a nail clip? next level stuff.

• Review by Max Ahoy ★★★★★ 9

  Strait of Solemn Sorrows

  I am but a vagabond venturing aimlessly across these vast valleys

  A common resident of this molten rock with which we all call our home

  Yet I feel as though I shouldn’t be allowed to walk alongside my fellow man

  At times I ponder whether or not I should continue to prolong my departure

  Or to finally rid my presence from this world, to deem myself as nothing more than another simple pest

  I wonder what would happen if I were to sink to the infinite bottom of the fearsome marine

  Would I be at peace?

  If I were to feel the seething sting of sour sea salt fill my lungs and pour back out into…

• Review by Pachinko Pop ★★★★½ 3

  Tomu Uchida hasn’t let me down yet! This, THE MAD FOX, and BLOODY SPEAR AT MOUNT FUJI have all been excellent.

  This film reminds me of Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW. Long swaths of the movie are police procedural, where the focus isn’t on the mystery of who did it, but around the details of the suspect and how the police are going to nail him. And the film wanders from protagonist to protagonist as we follow the fugitive himself, a woman who is infatuated / indebted to him, and the various detectives on his case.

  There’s also a spiritual element to the film which I find intriguing. Buddhist sutra, Itako spiritual mediums, and the spooky Mt Osore are all featured.…

• Review by Avirup

  Only film other than High and Low that masterfully merges the police procedural elements with rich social commentary. As well as a tale of guilt and fate, Uchida through the use of genre conventions gives a sharp and bleak portrait of postwar Japanese society. Truly wonderfully paced and visually stunning with its grainy images. An absolute gem of Japanese cinema.

• Review by Daniel Staebler ★★★★★

  For many years, this film was one of the 10 best Japanese films of all time, as listed by Kinema Junpo, Japan's oldest film magazine. However, it was only recently that we were able to discover it on DVD/Blu-ray in the West.

  In over three hours, the film tells the fascinating story of the escape of a man from police investigation for 10 years after the murder of a loan shark and his family on an island on the night a cyclone capsized a ship and killed over 500 passengers.

  Director Tomu Uchida presents some scenes in negative to enhance the film's traumatic moments. And this aesthetic process is wonderfully incorporated into the film.

  The murderer's motives are not used by Uchida to excuse his act, but to highlight the economic and social situation in Japan in the years following the Second World War.

  A masterpiece that deserves to be rediscovered.

• Review by D Rock ★★★★

  There are any number of tragic figures to focus on in this thoughtful, measured detective story that deals with killings 10 years apart. I count three main characters fitting that description, and that's without counting the hundreds of poor souls lost at sea when a ferry sinks during a typhoon.

  That's one of the events that sets this story in motion, and it's part of one of the finest openings I've seen in a movie in some time. Tomu Uchida just nails it, all the important elements needed to get us hooked falling into place. The visuals, the music, the narration, the tone, the teases that intrigue - just marvelous.

  Good thing too, because this film based on a novel…

• Review by Gregor Kreyca ★★★½ 2

  A three hour long Japanese investigation-procedural crime/drama from the mid 1960’s isn’t exactly an easy undertaking. And indeed, Tomu Uchida’s A Fugitive from the Past proofed to be quite challenging at times. It tested my attention-span on more than one occasion, during its lengthy runtime. There’s no getting around it, it’s a long movie and it feels long. But it’s also wonderfully shot, acted and directed and manages to tell a gripping at times moving story about choices, consequences, guilt and redemption. It is talky, very talky at times but the analytical police procedural is very well done and the movie also manages to give the viewer inside into world of a post-war japan.

  Like I said, A Fugitive from…

• Review by Sally Jane Black 2

  What I read about this, the only thing I knew going in, was that this was considered a Buddhist picture. I do not know enough about Buddhism to discuss it in those terms, but I really wish I did. I know a few things about Buddhism, about anatta and about trying to alleviate suffering, but I don't quite know enough to really see how anatta fits in (could make some arguments for it, but I'm just not confident enough in my knowledge of the concept to do so). The alleviation of suffering (or failure to do so) is something that can be seen in the film, but I dare not assume that, since that's one of the very few things…

• Review by Abhishek ★★★★

  Seemingly reminiscent of both in a discrete way- having the thrilling, disquisitive police-procedural elements of Kurosawa's "High and Low" and those cynical and expressively critical choices akin to Ōshima's "Death By Hanging" at times, Uchida's film fitly purveys a comprehensive, allegorical tale of human condition bespeaking the socio-political specters of hurtful past and destined atonement. Accompanied by a haunting score and noir-infused narrative, keeping that subtle sense of gritty realism, this morally complex story shines in its depiction of societal vulnerability and desperation- all in all, an incisive manifestation of moral culpability and expiation reflecting both- post-war devastation and the collective passivity and feebleness issuing from it.