Of the 55 features Masumura directed, The Red Angel is his most celebrated outside Japan – a film that has been amassing a sizeable cult following over the past decade. Set at the peak of the Sino-Japanese War, Ayako Wakao – in her most memorable performance – plays Sakura, a young nurse who is transformed from a rape victim into the titular angel when she starts gifting her patients with sexual relief before their inevitable death. The horrors of war – depicted in disturbingly graphic details unmatched by any other Masumura pic – are front and center here, but it’s the relationship between female agency and love/sex that emerges as the real preoccupation of the film. More than sixty years after its release, the power of The Red Angel has not waned.