A Wife Confesses

Exquisitely shot in intense black and white, this courtroom drama features Masumura regular Ayako Wakao as a woman accused of killing her husband — a professor with substantial life insurance — in a mountaineering accident. Referencing earlier classics such as Double Indemnity, its noir sensibility is crossed with an existentialism reminiscent of Resnais and Antonioni (a friend and influence on Masumura) to produce “one of Japanese cinema’s most striking portraits of a modern woman” (James Quandt). While often neglected in favour of the more extreme films Masumura completed later in the 1960s, various critics now consider it his masterpiece.