Best movies like Heroic Purgatory
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Heroic Purgatory Starring Mariko Okada, Kaizo Kamoda, Kaneko Iwasaki, Toru Takeuchi, and more. If you liked Heroic Purgatory then you may also like: Intentions of Murder, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, Woman in the Dunes, Ring 2, After Life and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
Rikiya Shoda is an engineer working for the Atomic Agency in Japan. One day, his wife Nanako returns home with a lost teenager called Ayu. A man, pretending to be the father, comes to get her back; Ayu keeps telling him that Rikiya and Nanako are her parents. Through this disruption, Rikiya suddenly starts remembering his youth as a revolutionary.
Heroic Purgatory
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Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
A down-and-out businessman travels to a seaside town, where he meets a woman with unusual sexual powers.
Woman in the Dunes
An entomologist suffers extreme psychological and sexual torture after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village.
Ring 2
While investigating the horrifying death of her boyfriend, Mai Takano learns about a videotape haunted by the spirit of a disturbing girl named Sadako, which kills anyone who watches it exactly one week later. When her boyfriend’s son, Yoichi, starts to develop the same psychic abilities as Sadako, Takano must find a way to keep the boy and herself from becoming the next victims.
After Life
On a cold Monday morning, a group of counselors clock in at an old-fashioned social services office. Their task is to interview the recently deceased, record their personal details, then, over the course of the week, assist them in choosing a single memory to keep for eternity.
Enter the Void
This psychedelic tour of life after death is seen entirely from the point of view of Oscar, a young American drug dealer and addict living in Tokyo with his prostitute sister, Linda. When Oscar is killed by police during a bust gone bad, his spirit journeys from the past -- where he sees his parents before their deaths -- to the present -- where he witnesses his own autopsy -- and then to the future, where he looks out for his sister from beyond the grave.
Funeral Parade of Roses
In late 60s Tokyo, Eddie, a young drag queen, is the favourite of Gonda, the owner of the bar where she works. This relationship provokes the jealousy of Gonda's mistress, Leda, the bar's matron. Eddie and Gonda decide to get rid of her...
Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets
Conditions have been better for the nameless protagonist: his grandmother is a shoplifter and his war criminal father and sister have an unhealthy, intimate relationship with the family rabbit.
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief
In Tokyo's Shinjuku district, the lives of a young man prone to theft, a young woman he meets at a bookstore, and a kabuki actor intersect.
The Man Who Left His Will on Film
A metaphysical mystery involving a university student's camera getting stolen, and the thief then committing suicide. Looking back upon the event, the situation comes to be questioned if it happened at all.
Survey Map of a Paradise Lost
Reporter Nukada's next big assignment is the secret world of Japanese phone sex clubs. He gets in touch with Midori, a part-time employee at the Banana Club, but is startled to hear she's been implicated in the bloody death of a client with perverted tastes, Kihara. Sensing a bigger story, Nukada uncovers a link between Midori and the late Kihara's wife and realizes that the situation is much more complex than he imagined.
Gushing Prayer
Desensitized and dissatisfied, a young yet jaded sexual veteran sets out on a journey of self-discovery while teetering on the threshold of womanhood. Yasuko is taking part in an orgy when she realizes that she has lost all feeling - not just physically, but emotionally as well. Now, with the weight of responsibility and adult expectation weighing down on her shoulders, Yasuko attempts to better understand how she could be so empty at such a tender age.
Violated Angels
A young man breaks into a nurses' rooming house and one-by-one kills off nurses.
Horny Working Girl: From 5 to 9
A woman named Chieko Kuwano is hired as an assistant manager at a large corporate office in Japan. She’s smart, sexy, and willing to do almost anything for her sex-starved new boss but, since he’s married, his deviant behavior makes her uncomfortable. Fed up with the boss and his perverted ways, the ladies in the building band together to enact their own special kind of revenge… that is, after they have a lesbian three-way slumber party, of course!
Death by Hanging
A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.
Confessions Among Actresses
In this intricately layered Japanese film, the nature of actresses and what they gain from acting is explored. The lives of three actresses are laid bare, and scenes from their lives are woven in and out of interviews with each of them. Each of them has experienced a traumatic event which contributes to their particular enjoyment of becoming someone else in dramatic roles.
The Embryo Hunts in Secret
A man keeps his girlfriend tied up in his small apartment and tortures her. She is undressed, subjected to various types of bondage, whipped, and tortured with a razor blade.
A Story Written with Water
Struggling with his true emotions, dreams, memories of the past and the reality Shizuo is about to marry, but is torn between his wife-to-be and the love to his mother.
Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano
A timid young woman who lives with her domineering mother accepts an Adult Video scout's offer to "become somebody else" by performing in porn videos. As she rises in popularity, the boundaries between her two lives begin to disintegrate.
Coup d'Etat
A freestyle biopic of Ikki Kita, the ultranationalist intellectual whose ideas inspired the failed military coup in 1936.
Earthquake Bird
Tokyo, Japan, 1989. Lucy Fly, a foreigner who works as a translator, begins a passionate relationship with Teiji, a mysterious man obsessed with photography.
Ecstasy of the Angels
A militant revolutionary group is torn apart by betrayal as its members descend into paranoia and sexual decadence.
Eros + Massacre
Two interwoven stories. The first is a biography of anarchist Sakae Osugi which follows his relationship with three women in the 1920s. The second centers on two 1960s students researching Osugi's theories.
Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees
A mountain man beheads his many wives to prove his love to an alluring woman he meets in an enchanted forest.
Sing a Song of Sex
Four sexually hungry high school students preparing for their university entrance exams meet up with an inebriated teacher singing bawdy drinking songs. This encounter sets them on a less than academic path.
Woman of the Lake
A married woman lets her lover take naked pictures of her. The photos end up in possession of a man who starts blackmailing the couple.
Celluloid Nightmares
A gruesome snuff video is found in a sex booth. It shows a young woman who is tortured, killed, and dismembered by an unknown sadist. The deadly blade is hidden inside the camera itself. Hisayasu Sato's regular Kiyomi Ito begins to investigate the videotape.
Akitsu Springs
Yoshida’s first big-budget production and colour film is a haunting tale of unrequited love and postwar disillusion. The story of the fatal attraction between a spineless intellectual and a strong woman is conventional, but its enactment is radically new.
Rampo Noir
Mars Canal - Within absolute silence, a naked man wanders through a dark and depressing landscape recalling the excruciating details of his last encounter with his former lover. Mirror Hell - When a series of women are discovered with their faces burnt and skulls charred, a young detective investigates, discovering that a unique hand mirror is always found at the scene. Caterpillar - A war hero returns home with no limbs and only his eyesight remaining. His beautiful wife, tired of taking care of him, turns to torturing her crippled husband for amusement. Crawling Bugs - A sexy actress is returning home from a successful night on stage, until her limo driver decides that she should be coming home with him.
Farewell to the Summer Light
A spontaneous romance blooms between Kawamura, a professor touring Europe, and Naoko, a married woman living in Paris, scarred by the Nagasaki atomic bombings. The two protagonists travel around Europe trying to find themselves.
Intentions of Murder
The neglected common-law wife of a Japanese librarian is repeatedly harassed by a young man with a heart condition who seduces her with the prospect of a better life.