In Gate of Flesh,occupied midcentury Japan is an icky, sweat-soaked cesspool of sex and violence where principles have dipped so profoundly that medieval torture has become standard operating procedure within a strictly governed sorority of prostitutes. Much like Mizoguchi’s Women of the Night nearly two decades prior, the film’s scathing view of mercenary postwar life sees sex work rising from the bombed-out vestiges of inner city Japan, but while Mizoguchi gazed directly into the despair by shooting on location, Suzuki erects his overcrowded harbor shantytown from scratch on a Nikkatsu backlot. The artificial framework affords him some of the most strikingly conceptual spaces in his body of work: a foggy subterranean ruin where color-coded hookers powwow in between assignments, a “church” interior that looks more like a painted Powell & Pressburger vista, and a series of cramped port-city alleyways teeming with multidirectional movement. Within this amoral playground, Suzuki crafts one of his most evocative narratives of personal desire colliding with pack mentality.