Confessions

Kokuhaku
a film by Tetsuya Nakashima

Yuko Moriguchi is a middle school teacher whose four-year-old daughter is found dead. Her life shattered, she finally returns to her classroom only to become convinced that two of her students were responsible for her daughter's murder. With the police having dismissed the child's death as an accident, Yuko puts into motion an intricate plan of revenge and psychological warfare designed to utterly destroy the lives of the two killers and to force them to realise the impact of their actions.

In the classroom an unruly mob of teenage students are having their milk break. As their teacher speaks they pay little attention, focusing more on throwing the cartons around, bullying one another, gossiping, or sending text messages. She announces that she is to quit teaching at the end of the month. She then speaks of how she became pregnant by her fiancé, Dr Sakuramiya, a dedicated and respected teacher who was diagnosed with AIDS. They had then chosen not to marry as it would be better for the child to have no father, than to have to live with the stigma. While he had later died, both she and their daughter, Manami, were lucky since neither of them had contracted the disease.

As a single mother, when Manami turned one year old, Yuko returned to teaching and would bring her daughter to the school crèche. At the age of four Manami was found drowned in the school pool and although it was considered an accident, Yuko knows that two of the students in her present class had murdered the child. Without naming them, she makes their identities clear to the other pupils and tells the class that under the juvenile penal code minors are not criminally responsible and therefore cannot be punished for their crime. So she has decided to take matters into her own hands and has injected her former lover's HIV-positive blood into the milk that the guilty pair have just been drinking. The classroom erupts into chaos. One of the two boys, Shuya Watanabe, is an intelligent child but has a sociopathic reputation among the students who say that he devises experiments to cruelly torture animals. The other student, Naoki Shimomura, is a weak-willed loner who has fallen under Shuya's manipulative spell. As Yuko finishes her confession each boy responds to the news in a very different way.

Following further confessions and perspectives of students and parents which fill in events before and after Yuko's testimonial, we later see that conscience-free Shuya continues his attendance at school where he is taunted, beaten and abused by his classmates. Naoki however, believing he is lethally infected, locks himself away in isolation, refusing to speak, eat or wash, watched over by his over-protective mother who will not accept that her child could have done anything wrong. Equally in the dark is the young and naive, new class teacher Yoshiteru Terada, who believes in befriending the students and trying to be one of them, but he too is manipulated by Yuko. Also drawn into the revenge tragedy is the schoolgirl Mizuki Kitahara, who has her own obsession with death and murder, and is also bullied for taking the side of Shuya. Increasingly, the dark, obsessive nature of the children is revealed and as the hysteria mounts, Yuko's revenge plan twists and turns to bring about the ultimate destruction of the lives of her daughter's murderers. The sound of something important disappearing forever. Her plan is made all the more awful by the fact that it relies so coldly upon the latent callousness and sadism of her class to unwittingly carry it out.

This unique, brilliantly crafted and devastating film is based upon the award-winning debut novel by Kanae Minato. Director Tetsuya Nakashima draws superb and utterly convincing performances from the young cast. His masterly use of dramatic camera angles, focus shifts and slow motion, innovative cinematography and the dynamic inclusion of hypnotic soundtrack music, creates a sense of cold bleakness and emotional distance, but with a stunning visual beauty. Focusing on the different characters and their own mini-confessions, the film unflinchingly explores the arrogance and cruelty inherent in the human psyche and its propensity to prey upon the weak and defenceless.