Masumura has directed various unsettling films about women, and The Wife’s Confession is his greatest: a courtroom drama/film noir/melodrama about a young wife Ayako (Ayako Wakao) who stands trial for the suspected murder of her abusive husband during a fateful mountaineering accident. Whether Ayako was attempting to save herself or deliberately murder her husband becomes the central mystery around which Masumura concocts his treatise on the consequences of free will, the vanity and phoniness of self-sacrifice, and the hypocrisy of a patriarchy unchanged by the promise of a post-war capitalist boom. Anchored by one of the most fascinating femme fatales of all film noirs, The Wife’s Confession is Masumura’s most morally and emotionally complex picture.