The period setting of the film begins with a woodcutter and a priest in Heian-era Kyoto as they huddle together in a downpour under the city gate; as the rain crashes down, they each recount a contradictory version of a recent criminal incident.
With mesmeric cinematography (from Kazuo Miyagawa: Floating Weeds, Yojimbo, the Zatoichi films) alongside an inventive use of sound, the non-linear treatment of time acquires a modernist dimension that has since become influentially renowned.
One of the first Japanese films to gain substantial international recognition (winning the Golden Lion at Venice, 1951), Rashomon is a dazzling meditation on subjectivity, ego and storytelling that reinvented the possibilities of narrative for cinema.