“This is futile. If it wanted to, the sand could swallow up cities and even entire countries. Did you know that? A Roman town called Sabrata and the one in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, both completely buried under particles an eighth of a millimeter wide. You can’t fight it! It’s hopeless!”

Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1964, The Woman in the Dunes is painful to watch. The plot is simple – an enotomologist hunts for insects in the sand dunes in a remote part of the Japanese coast. He misses the last bus home, so local villagers take him to a woman who lives a the bottom of a sand quarry and tells him she will  look after him. The next morning the rope ladder he used to descend into the pit is gone and he is trapped. The rest of the film chronicles his slow acceptance of his situation: kidnapped and enslaved by the villagers, tasked with the endless digging of sand and forced together with the woman who seems to have accepted her fate.

Watching the film leaves you thirsty – there are so many different varieties of sand: quicksand, sand ravines, sand flowing like water, blowing on the wind, that you feel like you are being buried yourself. It’s a film that operates on multiple levels – each acting as a microcosm of the other: the enotomologist traps bugs, then finds himself trapped. At first you find yourself willing him to escape, but it soon becomes clear that the point of the film isn’t his quest for liberation – it’s more a meditation on the routines of modern life and how to find simple pleasures in them. The man finally finds purpose when he discovers how to produce drinking water from the sand, and, in the end, this purpose is what keeps him in the quarry.

It’s a beautifully shot, eerie movie – with touches of M R James, J G Ballard and even Mad Max at times – threaded through with the mythological treatment of landscape and nature that the Japanese are so great at.