Confessions Blu-ray Review

• 20th Apr 2011

At the beginning of Confessions, the teacher of a class of 13 year old students announces that she is leaving her job. The largely disrespectful and chattering classroom don’t seem to notice her much until she changes the topic of her conversation to divulge the details of the recent death of her daughter at the hands of two of the pupils in the room.

At this point you’d expect this to turn into a tense whodunit – but the identities are revealed almost immediately as the teacher explains how this incident came to pass. She then leaves and the film, you realise, has only just begun.

What we get are strands of visual beauty, edited together with various diary-like confessionals from select members of the cast as the children deal with a new enthusiastic teacher and their views on the two boys responsible for the death of the daughter. We also see, in depth, how these boys react to being outed and the act of vengeance their former teacher has taken out on them.

The psychological study of the two boys builds as we see their reasons for being involved in the death of the young girl and how this impacts their lives. Where it takes each of them is quite harrowing, but the film never loses its artistic eye. Confessions does at time become a bit saggy in the middle and often you are always having to assert your attention to keep up with whose narrative you are following – but a film that makes you work is worth its weight in gold.

This isn’t a horror film or even a thriller necessarily, but has elements of both and is really worth visiting if you’d like to see inside the workings of a complex and riveting narrative. Something we in the west are still lacking. The Blu-ray transfer is great – and you also get a few extras, the most notable though is the 70 minutes with director, Tetsuya Nakashima.

Steven Hurst