Scenes of the boy’s harassment are set against images of happy young girls leaving school amid beautiful cherry blossoms and even a quirky musical number. There is no possibility of redemption for anyone, and social relationships are just a web of cruelty in which everyone is guilty.Ĭonfessions picks up on the extreme sentimentality and extreme cruelty that exists in Japanese cinema, and combines them, for instance, when the bullying of one of the accused boys is turned into a fun-looking, brightly-coloured, point-scoring game on the students’ phones.

Admittedly, there is something somewhat reactionary in the broad portrayal of young people as hopelessly self-centred, callous and insensitive, but the pessimism includes the adult characters too. Read the interview with Tetsuya Nakashima.īrilliantly, intricately edited, often using the juxtaposition of different viewpoints and moments in time to create complex meanings, the film offers a sombre view of an immoral youth. But Yuko’s ‘confession’ is followed by a series of further confessions from other characters, the film intercutting their points of view, each revealing some new twist until we reach the culmination of the revenge story.

This mesmerising sequence lasts for 30 minutes and seemingly reveals the whole plot of the film. Each of her disclosures is made all the more shocking by her even tone of voice, her astonishing words finally forcing the unruly students to pay attention to her. She then calmly proceeds to tell them about the murder of her daughter, how she discovered that the killers were two boys from her class, and how she has already taken revenge on them. In a remarkable opening sequence, the soft-spoken Yuko quietly tells her rowdy class that she will leave at the end of term. Adapted from Kanae Minato’s best-selling novel, Confessions tells the story of teacher Yuko Moriguchi’s diabolical revenge against the two 13-year-old boys she accuses of murdering her little girl. Tetsuya Nakashima has added one more to the list with Confessions, which equals Park’s Oldboy in the cruelty of the punishment and the sophistication of the set-up. Venues: ICA, Ritzy (London) and key citiesĬast: Takako Matsu, Yoshino Kimura, Masaki OkadaĪsian cinema does revenge well, and already boasts many excellent films on that theme, from Shunya Ito’s Female Convict Scorpion series to Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy.

Confessions kanae minato review