The Lower Depths

Set in late feudal Japan, the film takes place in a rundown Tokyo boarding house where impoverished tenants share a cramped and miserable existence. Among them are a thief, a former samurai, an ageing actor, a craftsman and his ailing wife, and a prostitute. A wandering old man arrives at the house and tries to lift the residents' spirits, encouraging them to believe that a better life is possible. His efforts founder on the residents' deep-rooted attachments: their physical and emotional dependencies overwhelm his guidance, and the thief's affair with the landlady, which he breaks off in favour of her younger sister, sets off a chain of resentment and violence.

Akira Kurosawa directed and co-wrote the film with Hideo Oguni, adapting Maxim Gorky's play and moving its setting from tsarist Russia to Edo-period Japan. It was the eleventh of the twenty-three films Kurosawa directed, following Throne of Blood and preceding The Hidden Fortress, and was produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka, Sōjirō Motoki and Kurosawa himself. Toshirō Mifune plays the thief, with Isuzu Yamada as the landlady, Kyōko Kagawa as her sister, Ganjirō Nakamura II as the husband, and Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara among the tenants.

Much of the action stays inside the boarding house. On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.2 from around 6,400 votes, and on TMDB 7.1 from 146 votes. A smaller group of six critics' reviews gives it 8.3, well above those audience scores.