After failing the entrance exam to a prestigious university, a young man, ashamed of letting down his mother, pretends to enroll. He falls in with a hardcore group of student political activists who, misreading his duplicity, mistake him for a police informer—the very incarnation of all they ideologically oppose. A moving study of social pressures and personal denial, shot in noir-ish black-and-white ‘Scope, A False Student exemplifies Masumura at his most complex and compassionate.