In Ugetsu, one of Kenji Mizoguchi's most sublime works, the all-too-real and the supernatural move steadily toward one another; a boat ride on foggy waters foreshadows the horizontal unity Mizoguchi will give to his two worlds. For, just as his images overflow with life--characters forever running off toward more life outside the frame--so this reality flows into the phantom universe as well. Even more subtly than Carl Dreyer (Vampyr), Mizoguchi builds an eerie other world entirely out of what he is given in this one: shadows and lighting, decor and texture, and the graceful chicanery of human desire. With the pandemonium of war as a looming ever-presence in their lives, the potter Genjuro (Masayuki Mori) and his wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) long to be "rich and safe." But things are never that simple, as they both will learn. Artistic vanity draws Genjuro into the paradisical realm of a dead young princess (Machiko Kyo) come back to experience the love of a man; he is cast back again to rejoin his wife only after she, too, has crossed over to the other side, having been murdered by marauding warriors as Genjuro languished in the moody marshland villa of the Lady Wakasa. Mizoguchi based the film (which introduced him to the West, winning the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival) on two tales from Ueda Akinari's seminal collection of ghost stories Ugetsu Monogatari, published in 1768. Its structure, however, is closely related to that of classical Noh drama.