In contrast to the elegant artifice of An Actor's Revenge, The Insect Woman brings us down to earth, physically and psychologically. It makes us grovel in a crawl space as it follows the trail of a rural woman who survives the war years and the difficult postwar reconstruction period by primordial instinct, impervious to all direction or restraint imposed from without. Tome (Sachiko Hidari in an obsessive, spellbinding performance), once at home in the tall grasses of her native village, migrates to the city and takes up a life of prostitution, eventually becoming a tyrannical madam. Imamura establishes her as a woman who survives an oppressive patriarchy with "insectlike" values that are irrelevant to modern notions of intelligence, beauty, or nobility. Shot, like all of Imamura's films, on location using natural sound, the film has a documentary-like grittiness that gives its rigorous structure the illusion of spontaneity.