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Confessions (2010)

Director: Tetsuya Nakashima

Time Out rating

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5 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

Clear your thoughts of Robin Askwith and his saggy white bum: with scenes of matricide, bullying, animal torture and the murder of kids, this ‘Confessions’ is about as far as it’s possible to get from a cheeky suburban romp. It’s also a long way from director Tetsuya Nakashima’s previous films: while his debut ‘Kamikaze Girls’ and dizzying sugar-rush melodrama ‘Memories of Matsuko’ flirted with themes of exclusion, abuse and violence, their DayGlo presentation and stylistic hubris masked a simple, sympathetic, humanist message.

Not so ‘Confessions’. It’s hard to remember a film so bleakly, furiously anti-people, in which almost every character is a vicious tyrant or a deluded, deserving victim, and most of them haven’t even graduated from high school. The film opens with a bravura 30-minute monologue, the first of the five ‘confessions’, in which teacher Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) reveals to her rowdy, self-involved pupils that the death of her beloved four-year-old daughter Manami wasn’t an accident, but an act of wilful murder carried out by two of the students in the class – and that she’s spiked those students’ free milk with HIV-infected blood.

From here, it’s a freewheeling downhill spiral of degradation and death, as Moriguchi’s revenge plan takes a series of savage twists, while her victims, psychotic engineering prodigy Shuya (Yukito Nishii) and remorseful recluse Naoki (Kaoru Fujiwara), become ever more desperate and unhinged. Nakashima’s signature stylistic inventiveness is exhilaratingly expressed in a series of stunning slo-mo shots of raindrops on windows and gathering storm clouds, lending a sense of impending tragedy which suffuses the entire film. The colour palette is steely and muted, a glassy, hauntingly beautiful urban landscape populated by abandoned souls who lack even the most basic human empathy.

But this atmosphere of rampant nihilism can become oppressive, and it tends to squeeze the life out of the characters: both Moriguchi and Shuya are psychologically convincing, but we never get a real sense of them as human beings. This could be a problem with translation: in many scenes, dialogue between characters is overlaid with voiceover and TV news broadcasts or interspersed with flashes of text messages and emails and it’s simply impossible to accurately convey this overload of information in subtitles.

‘Confessions’ was Japan’s entry for this year’s Foreign Language Oscar, but it came as no surprise when the film wasn’t nominated: a grim, challenging drama about murderous high school kids must be an unbeatable recipe for Oscar poison. But, like all of Nakashima’s films, it deserves wider attention: one of the few directors currently working who has intelligence enough to ensure that his films aren’t just eye-poppingly stylish but loaded with emotional substance, his is a bold and provocative body of work. ‘Confessions’ may be too grimly cynical to convince fully, but its combination of visual excess, dark wit, random violence, psychological insight and raw emotional intensity is intoxicating.

Author: Tom Huddleston

Time Out London Issue 2113: 17 - 23 Feburary, 2011

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User reviews of this film

cassius said...

Posted on Aug 22 2011 15:35 Full marks for trying to experiment, but the scattershot plotting just ends up with a story that is a somewhat uninvolving. Similar to Memories of Matsuko in this respect; the visual quality is superb but Nakashima is SO keen to be inventive that narrative plotting is overlooked and the result is a bit of a mess. Lots of lovely moments but the result just doesn't hang together well enough to sustain interest.

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mr_x said...

Posted on Mar 14 2011 10:25 this had some intriguing material and imagery and i sort of liked the structural novelty of it (though the voiceovers were just far far too long and many) - but it was like a never ending intro and more than that it just felt too much in mood and atmosphere like an indiewood film with all that insipidly soothing/sad music that never seemed to end and that awful radiohead song that they played TWICE. it made it seem just like any other american semi indie film about high school kids (gus van sants paranoid park, elephant seemed to pop into my head for some reason, though they were both better) except it was in japan. the tone almost reminded me of crash (the one with thandie newton, not james spader) actually, which is something i never want a film to do again. annoyed i paid to see it after reading this review. liked the depiction of the class and all the texting and blitheness but overall it just got a bit tedious.

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Gee said...

Posted on Feb 25 2011 01:39 Fantastic film, if you like films a bit for challenging than the usual 'three act structure', predictable, main stream cinema. It handles the story of vengeance in with the brooding, unnerving tension familiar in other SE Asian cinema ie Oldboy', it builds to an incredible last chapter. I was surprised that the story was based on a novel rather than a manga comic, it really has a comic book exaggerated feel, and the framing is very anime. The use of a constant soundtrack bed was unusual and effective too.
With a classroom full of kids like this you realise that the terrible premise behind 'Battle Royale' wasn't such a bad idea after all.

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Aindreas said...

Posted on Feb 21 2011 00:05 You're mad.Mad I tell you. It was structurally awful, lived on slomo, lacked any drive, the confessions structure was broken within 30 minutes - it was so tedious that for the last 40 minutes I fantasised about needing to pee. terrible glutinous ponderous splodge of a film with serious script problems. You robbed me timeout. You robbed me.

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matsuko said...

Posted on Feb 16 2011 12:56 >> about murderous high school kids
about murderous JUNIOR high school kids.

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