Red Angel

Directed by Yasuzo Masumura and known in Japanese as Akai Tenshi, this war film follows the nurse Sakura Nishi, sent to the Chinese front in 1939. She is raped by patients at the first hospital where she serves, then assists in countless amputations at a field hospital, and is ordered by a superior to submit to the demands of a wounded soldier who has lost his arms, a man who then kills himself. She forms a complicated attachment to Dr. Okabe, a morphine addict, follows him to the front, and there they are caught in a cholera outbreak and a hopeless siege. What most discussion centers on is Nishi's moral complexity: she protects the women in the army brothel and tries to save the life of the soldier who raped her. Masumura avoids battle scenes entirely, locating the horror inside the suffocating interior of the field hospital, keeping the frame cramped despite shooting in widescreen. The film was made more than twenty years after the war ended, at a moment of intense Japanese skepticism toward the country's militarist past, and it was marketed dishonestly, luring audiences with sensational taglines into an anti war film. Ayako Wakao appeared in twenty of Masumura's films, and this is considered their best. Who it's for: Anyone drawn to the darker wing of Japanese war cinema and to unusually forceful female characters. Who it's not for: Absolutely not for viewers who cannot handle sexual violence and graphic medical scenes.