Owl

Taking up the argument of ‘Onibaba’ (1964), the nonagenarian Director Kaneto Shindo places the action in the eighties: a mother and her daughter are mired in the deepest misery, eating only pine roots. To get out of poverty both shall exercise at home as geisha, but at the same time they will poison men who go parading around to take their money. The mechanism used is always the same: as a gift to the victim, they offered a glass of sake that, once ingested, makes them foam at the mouth uttering animal howls and dying in convulsions. —jsanchez