Paul Elliott’s review published on Letterboxd:
Written and directed by Shōhei Imamura, a significant filmmaker in Japanese New Wave, The Ballad of Narayama excavates the brutality of certain traditions together with the atrocities of the mechanisms of social conformity which often implement them.
Set in an impoverished rural Japanese village during the nineteenth century, the filmmaker provides the narrative with an enormous amount of observable recurrences as he accounts the tradition of senicide in Japan. The practice is often tied with folklore and instructs that all village residents be transmitted to a nearby mountain or similar desolate place once they reach the age of seventy and abandoned there to relinquish their life.
The storyline evolves to refuse the more straightforward directions in examining the film's themes as it attends a principally healthful sixty-nine-year-old woman named Orin, as she consumes her final months with her family. The emphasis transitions between paying attention to various villagers at varied periods, while frequently emphasising a consensus with nature, that's beautifully realised in a mixture of ways through the cinematography of Masao Tochizawa, incorporating some beautiful transitions of the changing seasons.
However, The fundamental focus is always on Orin as she's preparing all her affairs and making sure the village is in decent shape before she leaves for the mountain. There's some transcendental glorification bestowed to her willingness to sacrifice herself to the deities, resulting in the film emerging as a poetic exploration of morality and death; it deservingly went on to win the Palme d'Or at the thirty-sixth Cannes Film Festival.