Violated Angels

Based on the factual case of a young man who broke into a nurses' home in Chicago, mutilating and killing several of the inmates, Wakamatsu's film mercifully has nothing to do with casebook killings. What emerges from the film's rigorous beauty, sense of ceremony, and unsparingly attentive gaze, is a precise, sad delineation of a particular aspect of masculine sexual consciousness. The finale, in which the arrest of the murderer merges with police suppression of student protest, underlines its political relevance.