Film Reviews

Confessions

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• Details: Japan / 106mins (TBC).

Two films this week deal with revenge and justice in entirely different ways: True Grit's often-funny Western sees a child hunt down her father's killer, while Japan's serious teen drama Confessions reverses the Coen Brothers narrative and sees a teacher exact revenge on two children who killed her daughter.
Kicking off with a thirty-minute prologue where teacher Yuko Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) delivers her final lesson to her class. During her 'confession' she informs the class, and the audience, that two students, currently sitting in the classroom, killed her five-year-old daughter and because they're only thirteen they are exempt from a jail sentence (the authorities deemed the death accidental). Yuko's cold speech informs the killers that she has infected their lunch milk with HIV and pandemonium breaks out. The following term, the two killers - Naoki (Kaoru Fujiwara) and Shuya (Yukito Nishii) - are subjected to bullying by the class; Naoki has retreated to his bedroom, and himself, while the self-proclaimed genius Shuya doesn't want to stop his grisly plans now...
Adapted from Kanae Minato's best-selling novel, Confessions is a mixture of the themes brought up in River's Edge, Bully and Elephant: society has sired educated but soulless, apathetic and emotionally dead school kids with no moral standings. It's a grim film, not only in tone and theme but also in its splatterings of blood. The long series of monologues - everyone connected with the murder, from the teacher to the students responsible and their mothers, get to air their own views on what happened - takes some time to get used to. Ditto the time shifts with flashbacks and flash-forwards frequent throughout. But once that's achieved, Confessions is a fascinating film that builds to an unsettling and twisty climax.
Despite its weighty themes of murder, revenge, justice and what a life is worth, director Tetsuya Nakashima's selfishness sees to it that his direction is the most powerful element of Confessions. Playing out like a video for your typically MTV-sponsored heavy rap metal group who get millions thrown at their music video for average tunes, Confessions is far too stylised for its own good. Shot with chilly blue tones and almost entirely in slow motion, the director is at pains throughout to bring attention to his admittedly obvious talent. The visuals are impressive, of that there is no doubt, but when they overshadow and suffocate the important themes the film raises then those themes lose potency.

Review by Gavin Burke