Criterion Challenge 2026Challenge #17: Prequel/Sequel/Remake/Reimagining
I’m going to try to avoid making this a rehash of my review for Lady Snowblood, but a lot of my issues with that film carry over into this sequel.
First, a little background. These two films originated in a popular manga written by Kazuo Koike and illustrated by Kazuo Kamimura.
In the first film, we’re introduced to Yuki Kashima—a woman born in a prison as her mother was on her deathbed. Her mother, Sayo, recounts to her cellmates how she, her husband, and their son were attacked by four criminals who claimed that her husband was a government spy. Sayo’s husband and the child are slaughtered; Sayo is raped by the men and then taken away by one of them. After killing that man and escaping, she’s captured and sent to prison, but gets herself impregnated by a guard so she can send her daughter, Yuki, into the world as her instrument of revenge.
What follows in that film is much like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, where Yuki is tracking one by one each of the three remaining criminals to get revenge for what they did to her mother. Yuki, or Lady Snowblood, is born with the purpose of enacting revenge. Her mother looks at her infant face and says, “You will live your life carrying out my vendetta. My poor child . . . you are an asura demon.”
That’s pretty much what you need to know going into Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance.
We open the film with Lady Snowblood on the run from the law for the murders she committed in the first film. The first film has a winding and backpedaling quality, as it does the heavy lifting of integrating Yuki’s backstory into the present-day revenge story. The sequel is less burdened by that, and so it gets to play straight through with its simple narrative.
I say simple, but there is also a great deal of politics happening here involving a critique of Japanese imperialism in the wake of Japan’s victory over Russia in the 1904-1905 war.
Lady Snowblood is saved from execution by a form of secret police and effectively hired to infiltrate and assassinate an anarchist political dissident (played by one of my heroes, Juzo Itami) and retrieve a document that risks upending their political regime… somehow. That part was a little fuzzy to me. Sure enough, Yuki ends up siding with the peasant anarchist dissidents and joining in their cause, to the dismay of the police and the federal secret police.
I actually think I appreciate that this film is a slower-burning build-up to a crescendo rather than a series of set pieces, like the first one, bent on setting up the next one. Of course, you don’t get that without what the first film establishes, but I actually felt somewhat more connected to this story than the previous one.
And to speak more generally, there are quite a few twists and turns that are largely gnarly and dark and perfect for this type of genre fiction. Like the Juzo Itami character being infected with the plague by the secret police and sent into the slums as a pretext for “cleansing” it by burning it to the ground. There is a torture scene where the police pour boiling water on him to get information about Snowblood’s whereabouts. At one point, a heavy from the secret police gets chased by the residents of the slum and chained to a pole. He escapes one night by waiting for the guard to fall asleep so he can chop off his own arm with an axe.
So, the film has a real grisly mean spirit (complementary) that I found to be really engaging.
That being said, this film does suffer from some of the things that irked me about the first. Mainly, Yuki is such a stonefaced hero that sometimes it doesn’t seem like she has much character beyond being that asura demon killing machine. In this film, it at least offers to give her more agency, seeing as she sides with the political left seemingly for moral reasons. But I feel like you can count on one hand the number of lines of dialogue she has in this film. She mostly listens to others and is there to react with expressions. Meiko Kaji is very good at this, but Lady Snowblood as a character just never feels like a fleshed-out character in either film.
And even the one thing we’re supposed to know about her never really lands for me either, which is her volatile killing-machine nature. These films really do, unfortunately, drop the ball when it comes to the fighting. I mentioned it in my review for the first one, but 80-85% of these films look incredible and then for 15% (where there’s actual fighting to be done) there is just such a clucky, lazy, improvisational quality to them. Lady Snowblood will be surrounded on all sides by a dozen or so men, and she’ll vaguely take them out one by one with a swipe of her sword, but it looks and feels like children pretending in a field during recess. It can be annoying to be sitting here in my critic chair in 2026, complaining that they didn’t “do better” in 1974 with the fight choreography. But just as a movie-goer, these scenes did tend to take me out of the film a bit.
If the intent is for us to see her as this unstoppable force, there needs to be some delineation between what she does, her technique, and the circling goons that surround her. But unfortunately, there isn’t, and so she’s to be interpreted as a badass… just because the film tells us she is.
Outside of the fighting scenes, this film often looks incredible and painterly (clearly being inspired by the manga). The opening sequence of Yuki on the beach, as the opening credits are playing, had me wanting to pause every few seconds to admire the cinematography. And occasionally it dips into spaghetti-western territory of tension and camerawork. I just wish that level of care carried on throughout, the type that elevates to something beyond pretty gifs on a Tumblr blog or Pintrest board or posted on the subreddit r/cineshots.
I would say that the highs of this film are different than the highs of the previous one, which actually makes for an interesting one-two punch. I think I admire the narrative of this one a bit more. The connection between Juzo Itami’s character and his brother, a rebellious doctor who is mad at Itami for stealing his wife (a reveal that is kind of hilariously inserted) added to the tragedy when Itami does meet his end by the plague.
I’ll also give the film this: the film’s visual style does appear to be of its own kind. There’s much to admire about a filmmaker developing a fresh visual language and trying something new—even if it doesn’t always land for everyone. I felt similarly to Seijun Sazuki’s Branded to Kill. It’s inventive, but more often than not, it wasn’t for me.
And I guess I should talk about the word “iconic” for a moment. While both of these films do always hold up to scrutiny, there is an undeniable iconic element holding them together, possibly more so in Japan than here in the States. Meiko Kaji’s performance in these supposedly reinforced her icon status and much of her performing is subtle and reactionary. It kind of makes me think of Italian screen legend Giulietta Masina, whom I saw most recently in La Strada. Kaji has a similar, steely “that face can do anything” quality to it. It’s memorable at first glance.
These films are imperfect and sometimes frustrating and never quite as good as their most stunning frames make you think they could be. But there's something alive in them that's hard to shake. For all the “critic overthinking” that’s done here, I have to say that if I found out there were secretly five other Lady Snowblood sequels that had been unearthed, I’d sit down and watch them in a heartbeat. They are compelling in their own way, and sometimes that’s enough.
6.7/10
