THE SLEEPING BEAST WITHIN

“Straight-up Hitchcockian. There’s a missing man, a murder mystery, a drug trade, a scarred villain, and a religious cult that operates in the shadows.” -- Kyle Warner, City on Fire

Now available for the first time ever outside Japan, THE SLEEPING BEAST WITHIN is a high point in the first five years of director Seijun Suzuki’s career within Nikkatsu’s “Borderless Action” series. Drawing inspiration from Hollywood and the French New Wave, Suzuki’s works for Nikkatsu blended East and West, movie-fuelled fantasies and gritty realities of life in postwar Japan. Here, a newspaper reporter’s search for his girlfriend’s missing father leads him into heart of Yokohama’s Chinatown criminal underworld.