The camera swirls and swoops. The present gives way to the past, which, in turn gives way to the present, with the speed of a narrator who can't resist interrupting himself.

As in several other films, Oshima takes the story of a real-life criminal (here, a rapist and murderer) and uses it as the key to a sweeping analysis of the ills of post-war Japanese society.

Violence At Noon plays like Rashomon viewed through the crooked lens of Jean-Luc Godard, a prismatic take on rape and murder under the hot light of an interrogation room.

Violence at High Noon is a detached and disturbing portrait of post-war Japan that owes much to the films of Alain Resnais and Robert Bresson in terms of its non-linear structure and its fascination with the amoral activity of the social outsider.