A painfully slow yet exceptionally captivating tale of a man who chooses to devote his life to evil and the madness that follows, The Sword of Doom is more often than not defined by its meticulously precise construction. Serving as the first part of an unfinished trilogy adapting the famously incomplete Great Bodhisattva Pass, The Sword of Doom was thrust upon Kihachi Okamoto by Toho, due to them being dissatisfied with his previous film. Here, Okamoto not only delivers a grand, sweeping epic crammed with beautiful shots and exceptional staging but also marks it out as an expression of rage, conditioning and stylish tension. Although I found the pacing glacially slow in comparison to his other works, it's Tatsuya Nakadai's stunning performance that incarnates perfectly the paradox at the heart of his character which makes for such engaging viewing that it wasn't a huge deal breaker for me. Clean yet brutal, The Sword of Doom makes for a remarkably vicious gesture of destructive essence, with unmistakable visual beauty inseparable from horror.