Labyrinth of Cinema

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s final film is a metafictional journey through the world of Japanese war movies, and their relationship to the actual horrors of war. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi is famous in the West mainly for his film House, from 1977, which so far I know only by reputation as a wild, playful, and surrealist ride through the horror genre. But he’s directed over seventy films that are largely considered eccentric and avant-garde. I started watching his final film, from 2019, Labyrinth of Cinema without realizing any of this, purely on word of mouth. Labyrinth of Cinema begins with a mysterious old hipster in…