Those looking for Tetsuya Nakashima's next candy-colored visual extravaganza may be a bit disappointed in the first few minutes of his latest film Confessions.  I'd expect that disappointment to be short-lived, though, as Confessions is engaging right from the start.  The film certainly lacks the musical numbers and high-octane animated sequences that first brought the world's attention to Nakashima in Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, but the film is, nonetheless, very highly stylized.  Instead of neon colors, we have grays.  Instead of hyperactive camera work, we get long stretches of slow-motion.  The focus remains, as always, on the story, and Nakashima is a master of getting exactly what he wants.

Because I really hate writing synopses, I will let Third Window Films do that for me:

From the director of 'Memories of Matsuko' and 'Kamikaze Girls', Tetsuya Nakashima this time leads us into a much darker territory.

Reigning in his impulse to create surreal candy-colored worlds full of chaos and confusion, Nakashima opts instead for an intense drama throbbing with dark emotions and powered by a savage central performances. Television heroine, Takako Matsu, plays a middle-school teacher whose four-year-old daughter is murdered. Shattered, she finally returns to her classroom, only to become convinced that two of her students were responsible for her daughter's death. No one believes her, and she may very well be wrong, but she decides that it's time to take her revenge. What happens next is all-out psychological warfare waged against her students in an attempt to force them into confessing what she knows in her heart to be true: they are guilty. And it's true: they all turn out to be guilty, but not of the crime she thinks they committed.

Confessions is amazing.   If I'd seen it in 2010, it would most definitely have made my top ten list.  The film gets off to a running start and only picks up speed as it goes.  Despite the profusion of slow-motion shots in Confessions, the film never seems to rest or take a breath.  Each moment in the film is carefully calculated to make the audience feel something.  There are multiple plot threads weaving in and out each other.  Alternate realities and multiple points of view seem to obscure the reality of the events unfolding, however, what they are really doing is unveiling the characters motives, emotions, and desires. 

It is rare for me to get more interested in a film as it progresses.  Typically, I abandon expectations at the beginning and go into films ready to love them.  Often, they lose me, and my attention wanes, but once in a while, something will really grab me and draw me further and further into its world.  Confessions is just such a film.  Every scene uncovers a little bit more of the story, and I found myself literally leaning into my TV screen waiting for the next bombshell to drop.  Every new revelation made me eager to get to the next one.  Nothing is as it seems, and though everything seems to wrap up in the end rather neatly, there is still that tinge of uncertainty about where the characters will go from there.

Confessions deserves all of the accolades that have been heaped upon it so far.   Twitch writers have been a bit conflicted about the film, but I can't praise it enough.  Niels Matthijs called it "an audiovisual masterpiece, bearing an interesting plot, powerful emotions and some poignant social commentary,"  and said, "if you see only one Japanese film a year, make sure it's this one."   Ben Umstead was less enthusiastic, but still positive in this conclusion that, "Confessions is an unbalanced social commentary; equal parts poignant and ridiculous, but ultimately engaging enough and worth the watch."  I tend to lean more toward the former opinion, but I see Ben's point.  I didn't find the social commentary terribly obtrusive.  I placed the film firmly in its own world, and so attempting to attribute social commentary to its plot seemed to go against the highly stylized vision Nakashima had.

Either way, Confessions is a film definitely worth seeing.  I plan on watching the film again this week, just because I'm sure there are nuances I missed.  Tetsuya Nakashima proves, once again, that he is a master of mise-en-scène, with everything affecting everything else, and each image on the screen carefully chosen, placed, and utilized to his own exacting standards.  Most definitely a success.

The Disc:

Third Window Films follows up their recent amazing Blu-ray of Memories of Matsuko with another winner.  The transfer is absolutely spotless, with detail pouring from every frame.  The film was heavily desaturated, and I can guess that the image we see on this Blu-ray is exactly what Nakashima intended.  The audio is equally good, if not better.  The entire 5.1 sound field is full of detail, from the clear and clean dialogue coming from the front, to the ambient noises and peripheral conversations coming from the sides and rears during the classroom sequences.  Perfect. 

Third Window have provided a few extra features on a separate PAL encoded DVD.  The most impressive of these is a seventy minute making-of documentary titled "Real Confessions".  This was quite eye opening.  Nakashima is quite the taskmaster, and very particular about what goes into his films.  He is interviewed along with his technical crew and several cast members, all of whom talk about how hard he is on them, one of the child actors talks about performing 37 takes of the same shot.  They all praise him in the end though, even though he looks like a really difficult guy to please.  He isn't the type to let his actors go off-book, he wants them to perform the film as he sees it in his mind, and if they aren't quite there, he has no problem with correcting them.  It shows the level of dedication he has to his work, but hey, if you're gonna make a movie, you might as well make it count.  The documentary also goes behind the scenes in showing what it took the technical crew to make Nakashima's vision real.  It turns out he's just as hard on them!  At least he doesn't seem to have any bias!  The other substantial extra is a seventeen minute featurette with brief interviews of all of the child actors in the film and their feelings about the experience and Nakashima as a director.  After what I wrote above, I'm sure you can guess.  Third Window have also included trailers and TV spots for Confessions as well as trailer for some of their other films.

Confessions is an absolute unqualified winner for me, and I can't wait to see it again.  The Third Window Blu-ray is coded for Region B, so Europeans and Brits should have no problem.  The rest of us will need region free hardware.  If you can play this disc, by all means, go get it!

Third Window Films will release Confessions on Blu-ray and two disc DVD on April 25th.