Akira Kurosawa: Every Movie Ranked Worst To Best

17. I Live In Fear (1955)

Ikiru 1952
Toho

Kurosawa's most visceral portrait of post-war nuclear dread, I Live in Fear follows an elderly patriarch (who else but Toshiro Mifune?) whose fears of nuclear devastation during the war forces him to question both his sanity and his family's safety.

Released just one year after the madly popular Seven Samurai, the relentlessly bleak drama perfectly highlights the versatility of Mifune and uses his frail, shattering performance to symbolise Japan's national state of mourning following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Perhaps Kurosawa's most harrowing film, I Live in Fear is an unmistakable masterclass that manages to capture an entire nation's trauma through the eyes of a doomed old man, and ends with an absolute gut-punch.

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