The movie then moves inside, introducing us to a painfully ritualistic society in which people move and talk in slow motion. The rooms are spartan and feel two-dimensional. Kurosawa is imitating theater, creating an artificial world of symmetry and visual order. But it’s the destruction of that outward perfection that interests Kurosawa and he wastes no time in introducing one of cinema’s great bitches, Lady Kaide (Mieko Harada), wife of Taro, the eldest son. In her oppressively layered costumes, which themselves suggest mounds of duplicity, she orchestrates the banishment of Hidetora from his kingdom and instigates a war between the brothers. Lady Kaide may have wandered in from the set of MacBeth (or Kurosawa’s own Throne of Blood) but she is a product of Japan’s Noh theater: her makeup represents the face of remorseless Vengeance. Mourning the death of her husband later in the movie, she impassively crushes a butterfly between her fingers.

Hidetora’s other daughter-in-law, Lady Sue, is a devout Buddhist and faithful subject, even though Hidetora once ravaged her home and blinded her brother. She has chosen forgiveness, which Hidetora can’t understand. She, like his sons, behaves contrary to what he expects. Interestingly, her face is never shown, nor that of her brother’s. They are spirit-like, floating somewhere above the political maneuverings. That Lady Sue and Lady Kaide should meet the same grisly fate points to a resigned atheism. Nothing is rewarded and everything is punished in a world devoid of divine intervention.

And yet God is everywhere in this movie. He’s certainly in the battle scenes, which Kurosawa has filmed with a kind of omniscient detachment. He’s also in the weather – gentle at first, then increasingly stormy as brother fights brother, and ultimately hurricane force as Hidetora goes insane and wanders the wilderness with his Fool. This is all punctuated by large, billowing clouds that Kurosawa frequently cuts to as if to emphasize the immateriality of it all. Clouds finally give way to a red sunset as the death toll mounts and we are left with complete destruction in the movie’s final scenes. But nowhere is God’s presence more apparent (and sorrowful) than in Hidetora’s wizened face. Reason having long since abandoned him, his skin becomes chalky white, his beard long and unkempt, his face completely slack. He has grown confused by his own creation run amok and has lost the ability, and desire, to control it.

Ran was not Kurosawa’s last film, but if feels like it. It’s a movie about an old man, made by an old man, both of whom were weary of the world. At one point, Hidetora remarks, "How hard it is to be old!" For Kurosawa, the difficulty was in reconciling the hypocrisies he saw around him. Of his movie Rashomon, he wrote in his autobiography, "human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves… even the character who dies cannot give up his lies." This cynicism informs Ran’s ideology: who can endure a world where God is present but powerless, where family members betray each other, where insanity is the only means of survival? Enshrining the story in a sumptuous visual style, Kurosawa has perhaps created the ultimate social critique – a movie whose outward richness seduces us into thoroughly enjoying a tale of human damnation.