Sandome no satsujin (The Third Murder) -- which is way more gripping and finely-crafted than Murder On The Orient Express -- is a Japanese whodunit wrought with the dramaturgy of a Russian novel. Right at the opening, we see a murder being committed: Takashi Misumi (Koji Yakusho) is clubbing a man -- the owner of a factory where he works -- to death on a riverbank. But in its staunchly reflective storyline, The Third Murder is as much about the murder itself as it is about the killer's complex motif that underlines the elusiveness of truth, reason, justice and victimhood -- of crime and punishment.
The story is largely told from the point of view of Tomoaki Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama), a lawyer who takes up the task of defending Misumi. It is revealed that Misumi has committed murder in the past, in Hokkaido, where he was spared the death penalty by the merciful judge who was Shigemori's father (the judge, however, complains that had he sentenced the man to death, there would have been no more murder). With more blood on his hands this time, Misumi is unlikely to escape the injection. Shigemori, the lawyer, is determined to argue in his defence and at least bring down the sentence.
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, well-known to his fans for carefully-observed family drama, The Third Murder is more sombre in tone and darker in subject than the director's previous movies. And yet it still bears the hallmark of Kore-eda in the way the murder investigation opens up family wounds and fatherly mishaps, because the suffering of the children is often the wrongdoing of their parents (and vice versa): Misumi has an estranged daughter, and so has his lawyer Shigemori. The victim, too, has a teenage daughter, Sakie (Hirose Suzu), a sad girl with a bad leg who's probably connected with the crime.
A bulk of the story takes place in the lawyer's office, and later in the courtroom where the characters step up to testify. But The Third Murder has an eerie power -- gloomy and disturbing to some -- in a recurring scene when Shigemori visits Misumi in prison, where they have a conversation separated by a glass panel, the law on one side and lawlessness on the other. You could say truth on one side and lies on the other -- but which is which? The intrigue of the plot lies in the fact that Misumi, who we see to be killing the victim and who confesses to the police, is an unreliable narrator of his own story. He changes details, flip-flops on his motif, withholds crucial information and at one point considers revoking his confession altogether, while Shigemori, who declares repeatedly that he doesn't care what the truth is and his concern is solely strategy and legal interpretation, struggles to make sense of his unusual client.
Koji Yakusho, the Japanese veteran actor, plays Misumi, the murderer who, strangely, morphs into the moral epicentre of the tale fraught with ethical pitfalls and dark secrets. Fans of Japanese cinema are familiar with his wide latitude that sees him into various roles over the past 30 years, from hero to villain, from solemn to odd, especially in the New Japanese Cinema of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In The Third Murder, he's the killer but also the judge, the executioner, and the victim of his own crime, alternating between repentance and arrogance, a complex role that requires great charisma and power or the film risks losing the audience's willingness to follow the trajectory of Misumi's narrative.
A tense, suspenseful and rewarding film, The Third Murder shows Kore-eda's attempt to expand his style and oeuvre, following the domestic and international success of films such as Dare mo shiranai (Nobody Knows, 2004), Aruitemo aruitemo (Still Walking, 2008), Soshite chichi ni naru (Like Father, Like Son, 2013) and Umimachi Diary (Our Little Sister, 2015).
In those films, Kore-eda explores the nuances of family dynamics that charts the happiness (and unhappiness) of his characters. In the new film, he grows more philosophical in topic and aesthetics as he looks at the hard question about justice -- by law and by human, which is the same -- and in the end he confirms his place as one of the master filmmakers at work in the world today.
The Third Murder
Starring Koji Yakusho, Masaharu Fukuyama, Hirose Suzu Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda In Japanese with Thai and English subtitles at selected cinemas
