Having found the perfect tree for their statue of goddess Kannon, master sculptor Shigetomo (Tatsuo Hananuno) and his young apprentice Yosaku (Akira Ishihama) shelter from a snowstorm in an abandoned shack. During the night, the evil snow woman enters the shack and freezes Shigetomo, but takes a fancy to to Yosaku, sparing his life on the condition that he never speaks of their encounter.
With his master dead, Yosaku is assigned the task of carving the statue of Kannon, but must first wait five years for the wood to be ready; during this time, he meets and falls for pretty Yuki (Shiho Fujimura). At the behest of Shigetomo's dying widow, Yuki agrees to marry Yosaku and the couple are blessed with a son, Tarô (Shin'ya Saitô). However, a jealous bailiff wants Yuki for himself, and threatens to have Yosaku arrested on a trumped up charge unless he can pay a fine. When Yuki is able to raise the money, the bailiff tries to rape the woman instead, unaware that she is, in reality, the snow woman.
Sound familiar? That could be because The Woman of the Snow's traditional ghost story was also used for the second tale in the classic 1964 Japanese horror anthology Kwaidan (although it was cut from the American version to reduce the film's 183 minute runtime to a more manageable 125 minutes). This feature length version of the same tale is very similar to the one in Kwaidan... a tragic, poetic, slow-burner with superb cinematography, excellent performances and decent special effects; however, even at just 80 minutes, it feels like it is stretched awfully thin.
If you have your heart set on watching just one film version of the story, I would fast-forward to the second tale in Kwaidan: it does the same job, and you'll save yourself twenty minutes or so.
