Conflagration

Screening as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026. This title of this year's programme is Knowing Me, Knowing You: The True Self in Japanese Cinema. 

If you book three or more films in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026, each ticket will be discounted to the special price of £8. Simply add the tickets to your basket and the offer will be applied at check-out.

In the stillness of a sacred temple, one young man’s yearning for purity becomes a descent into darkness.

In postwar Kyoto, Mizoguchi Goichi (Ichikawa Raizo VIII), a troubled and stuttering youth, arrives at Shukaku Temple seeking solace and spiritual purpose as an apprentice monk, hoping one day to succeed as head priest.

Having been raised himself in a temple and inspired by his father’s stories of Shukaku Temple’s divine beauty, Goichi is enchanted by its serene perfection yet tormented by memories of his mother’s adultery and his father’s death.

As the world around the temple begins to intrude — tainted by vanity, lust, and hypocrisy — his ideal of pure beauty twists into something darker. The head priest, Tayama Dosen, a friend of Goichi’s father, keeps a geisha mistress, and with the monks profiting from tourism while indulging in worldly pleasures, Goichi’s disillusionment deepens. He becomes increasingly unmoored from reality.

Ostracised for his speech disorder and manipulated by a cynical friend played by the recently passed Nakadai Tatsuya, star of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, Goichi’s remaining faith in humanity and religion completely disintegrates. What begins as reverence curdles into obsession. 

Inspired by true events and Mishima Yukio’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, this haunting psychological drama examines the fragile boundary between reverence and fanaticism, revealing the turbulent inner conflicts at the heart of the human condition. Director Ichikawa Kon presents the story in a dreamlike, fragmented style that mirrors Goichi’s mental descent. 4K digital remastered film.

Contains abusive language and references to suicide.

Image: © 1958 Kadokawa Pictures