The Bad Sleep Well

By the end of this film, I could have sworn that The Bad Sleep Well was made by Masaki Kobayashi not Akira Kurosawa. The film ends up too cynical about contemporary Japanese corporate culture without the balance of tender humanity that I know Kurosawa for. It’s also pure noir with a jazzy and almost threatening score by Masaru Sato, a certain nihilism, and a constant sense of unease. All it’s really missing is a femme fatale and voiceover.

A very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ...