Confessions

C

Directed by Tetsuya Nakashima

Tetsuya Nakashima’s tale of revenge swings for the fences with its ambitious, scandalous premise but comes up short on the delivery, offering an awkward, overly serious take on a pretty absurd subject matter.

A middle school teacher, following the death of her young daughter, informs her class that she is quitting. Before she does, however, she lets her class know that her daughter’s murderers are in her glass and that, due to the fact that they are both protected by Japan ’s juvenile criminal code, she has taken the law into her own hand and has spiked the milk they drank earlier that morning with a deadly virus. The rest of the film follows the fallout from the teacher’s actions and the two infected students as they struggle to regain control of their lives after the incident.

I don’t have any issue with films that go for the shock factor, but there’s certainly a way to do it that demands a certain amount of tact and skill. Oftentimes films which try to shock work best if they tinge their approach with a fair amount of humor, usually of the absurdist variety, not so much to take the edge off (though it helps) but more to keep a measure of context to the far fetched nature of the plot. While watching “Confessions” I repeatedly thought of another Japanese director, Sion Sono, and couldn’t help but feel that he could have taken the subject matter of “Confessions” gone way, way further with it and still made a film that was entertaining and watchable. Confessions takes itself much too seriously which doesn’t sit well in a film that has such an absurd plot. There are certainly elements here and there in Nakashima’s film that have some promise and a teacher taking revenge on her students is probably a cathartic subplot that a number of individuals in the teaching profession might perversely take pleasure from. But the execution is lacking and despite its considerable length, “Confessions” covers surprisingly little ground.

On the plus side, the technical aspects of the film are for the most part well done and there’s an interesting, if not altogether original, camerawork that runs through “Confessions”. This goes to show, once again, that even a lacklustre film can at least be partially redeemed by attention to more technical details.