It's excellent and I thoroughly approve of it... but I hated it.

It's shining an unsympathetic spotlight on the Shinsengumi, the notorious samurai-police-assassins in Kyouto during the Meiji Restoration. They fought on the side of the Tokugawa military government and did lots of killing... and they've been in lots of films, anime, etc. and are often portrayed heroically. In reality, they were notoriously cruel, e.g. hunting down and killing any of their own members who tried to leave. This film shows us that. It's one of the bloodiest, grimmest 1960s samurai films. The tone's set almost immediately by a Shinsengumi recruitment drive. These keen potential recruits are told to fight each other with bokutou (lethal wooden swords) rather than shinai (harmless bamboo swords). Why? Answer: "the Shinsengumi does not need weak men!"

Result: men getting beaten to death, with close-ups of their bloody faces.

In other words, they're evil. Our hero's about to kill himself for not getting accepted, so everyone happily gathers to see the entertainment. "Oh, you're going to commit hara-kiri? Interesting!"

He survives, albeit with a dangerous wound in his stomach... which doesn't get him excused from sword practice. "Your injury will heal with exercise!" (Spoiler: not true. Instead, it nearly cripples him.)

Theoretically, I love all this. It's an astonishing portrayal of ultra-violent bastards and idiots. If you ever want to shatter someone's illusions about samurai, show them this film. The Shinsengumi regularly go out to kill, but it's hard not to decide that their favourite target is themselves. The standard death for a Shinsengumi in this film is by execution in front of everyone after being accused of some perceived infraction. The following, for example, gets one man hacked to death:

"Did you lie about your mother's condition?"

"No, I..."

"Don't speak! You liar! Why did you stop by some woman's place?"

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"

"How can you come back here after sleeping with some woman? You rotten, no-good...!"

The Shinsengumi's founder and leader was assassinated by his own men. We see this. The killers even murder a naked woman who was also in his bed at the time... and this is historical fact. It looks like a gangster film, but that scene isn't fictional. The target's name was Serizawa Kamo and the woman's name was Oume.

All that should have been great, but I hated spending time with these people. They're swaggering, macho halfwits. Everything they do and say is loathsome... and yet our hero wants to be one of them? He travelled from his village to try to join them. He's less of a twat than they are, but he still becomes one of their foot soldiers and participates in their kangaroo court executions. In other words, he kills his own comrades. There's a girl he talks to, but she's allowing us no illusions about this era either.

"If the country's economy improves, do you think the lives of farmers will get better? Maybe the annual tax will be less, and everyone's debt will be gone, and the girls of the village won't be sold to the brothels."

In the West, this is a relatively obscure film. It doesn't have a wikipedia page. It had a fairly low budget and was filmed quickly in black-and-white, but everyone involved took it seriously and it won awards. I admire it... but I had trouble making myself sit through it. What a bunch of tossers.