Grass Labyrinth

Grass Labyrinth (Kusa Meikyū) is a Japanese film by director Shuji Terayama. Only forty minutes long, it was released in France in 1979 along with two other short avant-garde films by Just Jaeckin and Walerian Borowczyk.

A young man named Akira (Takeshi Wakamatsu) is searching for the music and lyrics to a song he loved as a boy. In his search, he slips into a kind of time warp, and his childhood and adulthood begin to blur together. There are strange recurring images—balls of various sizes, including a dinosaur-egg-like “pregnancy stone,” which may have magically impregnated Akira’s mother.

Desperate to recover the song, Akira wanders through a frantic, dreamlike labyrinth. Along the way he comes upon the grungy home of an unhinged, nymphomaniacal witch who's been waiting years for her lover to return. She sheds her clothes and attempts to seduce (or perhaps assault) Akira as a boy (Hiroshi Mikami) in a scene that's both wildly surreal and deeply unsettling. The screeching bird and the witch’s ghostly makeup make it all the more disturbing.

Akira escapes, only to be tied to a tree by his mother, who claims she's protecting him. She writes magical words across his skin and clothing to ward off the witch should she return. Later Akira visits a brothel, witnesses the body of a woman, who's drowned herself, wash ashore, and eventually seems to become trapped in a maze-like house near the film’s end. The final sequence is grotesque and strangely compelling. Difficult to describe, and best seen.

I’ve read that Terayama’s other films also depict the nightmarish dread children experience when faced with cruelty and indifference. In Grass Labyrinth, Akira’s obsession with the song suggests a longing for the past, with nostalgia tangled up in distorted memory and rendered through a surreal lens.

There're countless striking images, bold colors, and rapid, fragmented cuts that create a remarkably intense effect. All of it adds to the film’s unsettling atmosphere. Definitely memorable.