Throne of Blood Movie Download

8 / 10

Gloomy, atmospheric retelling of the Shakespeare story
Trust Kurosawa. He’s a director who can take Shakespeare’s Macbeth, wholeheartedly transplant it to feudal Japan, swap around many of the characters and situations, get rid of whole sub-plots and set-pieces and yet somehow create one of the most recognisable and authentic Shakespeare adaptations of all time. While Polanski’s TRAGEDY OF MACBETH will always be my very favourite adaptation of this play – I saw it at an impressionable age – THRONE OF BLOOD comes a close second.

It’s the most atmospheric Kurosawa film I’ve seen to date. Every scene is filled with foreboding and dread and the forest sequences are spectrally superb – full of creeping mist and sinister, ghostly figures. It’s a film dripping with portent and laden with fear, led by a typically bravura and arresting performance from Toshiro Mifune as a ‘take no prisoners’ type who commands respect from the viewers despite his nefarious crimes.

There are other elements of genius in the mix, not least Isuzu Yamada’s Lady Macbeth, a truly repugnant creation who made me shudder with her plotting and evil intent. You’d be forgiven for expecting an anticlimax come the ending, given the intense build-up throughout the movie, but this is one film in which the climax genuinely impresses: a scene involving a storm of arrows that’s still unsurpassed until this day.Read More