Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Takako Matsu, Masaki Okada, Yoshino Kimura, Mana Ashida, Kai Inowaki, Kaoru Fujiwara, Sora Iwata, Daichi Izumi, Karin Kato, Takuya Kusakawa, Ayaka Miyoshi, Hiroki Nakajima, Yukito Nishii
Written by Tetsuya Nakashima
Certification TBC
Runtime 106 minutes
Directed by Tetsuya Nakashima
Japan's official entry for Best Foreign Film at the 83rd Academy Awards next year, Confessions is an incredibly grim, surrealist vision of society that amplifies the truth behind its subject matter to the nth degree by never failing to depress. Dark, powerfully emotive and heavily stylised, the film paints a picture of a world overflowing with dread and not a lot else.
Written and directed by Tetsuya Nakashima (Kamikaze Girls) from the award-winning first novel by Kanae Minato, Confessions is the pitch-black story of a school teacher who carries out a master plan of vengeance on the two 13-year-old students responsible for the death of her young daughter. And while the premise is simplistic, the way in which she extracts her revenge is completely the opposite. This isn't your typical tale of revenge from the Orient with an enraged protagonist slicing and dicing her enemies with rather sharp instruments, but a blisteringly psychological ride of unnerving intensity that builds and builds until it blooms into a cinematic black rose. It's hauntingly beautiful.
The opening half an hour of the film is quite literally just one long monologue as the teacher tells her rambunctious teenage class every twist and turn in the story of her daughter's death, while revealing that the two perpetrators are sat before her in the very same room. She doesn't let their names be known, instead referring to them as Student A and B, but it soon becomes clear that everyone in the class knows exactly who were behind the four-year-old girl's murder.
First threatening her class with milk tainted with the blood of her dead, AIDS-infected partner, the teacher resigns from the school and sets her disturbingly ingenious plan into motion, which then evokes the personal confessions of various students who she taught. But despite taking solace in their protection from the law because of their age, those responsible for the child's death endure a dramatic downward spiral that turns their lives upside down, and sends them plummeting into a sickly caliginous world of excruciating mental punishment.
The brooding tone from beginning to end will put many audiences off the film, but I've always appreciated a movie that dares to be different. The encumbering darkness and absolute lack of redemption create much more of an impact than if there was to be light at the end of the tunnel and so the unsettling unconventionalism is refreshingly bleak.
Simply because it is such a tenebrous piece of film-making, as brilliantly gruelling as it is, its almost multi-generic make-up of drama, thriller and bloody horror make it almost inevitable that a rather ignorant snubbing from the Oscars lies in its near future, which is a real shame as it's such a fiercely original effort.