Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita (Linda Linda Linda) had at least three films represented at this year’s Montreal Fantasy Festival, including the anime “Ghost Cat Anzu” and the serious high-school comedy “Swimming in a Sand Pool.” The shortest and most simplistic of these films, but perhaps the best, is “Confession,” a manga adaptation in which two mountaineering refugees from a snowstorm spend a long, disturbing night in a cabin. The fact that one of them has just confessed to murder means that this type of crime is likely to happen again before dawn.
This two-act or more-than-one thriller is one of the best films that can squeeze the most value out of an idea that we might assume is too limited to last more than a short film. It's a well-crafted, entertaining, cat-and-mouse thriller that could attract interest for a remake abroad.
A short prologue tells us that Sayuri (Nao Honda, who appears in flashbacks) disappeared while on a college club hiking trip, and her body was apparently never found. She formed an inseparable trio with her ex-lover Asai (Touma Ikuta) and Korean exchange student Jeong (Yang Ik-joon); ever since, the two men have been climbing the same mountain every year in her memory.
Sixteen years later, this memory takes a dangerous turn—Jiong is injured in a fall amidst freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall. Not knowing how far they have gone from shelter, he decides to give up, saying, “I deserve to die.” He confesses to his old friend that he strangled Jiong to death himself, out of frustrated desire and jealousy, and left her body in the wilderness.
Moments later, it is revealed that the wanted mountaineers’ hut is, in fact, just out of sight, just around the corner. Asai manages to coax his wounded friend inside, and then lights a fire. But once they realize that no one will die in the cold, the embarrassment of this earlier confession begins to set in. Jeong soon begins to regret his candor, and Asai fears that his friend cannot allow him to live with the knowledge that now condemns him. At first, this is expressed as mutual distrust, then escalates into violence, and their struggle for life is complicated by the occasional hallucinatory quality. Despite his injured leg, Jeong keeps disappearing and reappearing with such terrifying suddenness that we begin to wonder whether what we (and Asai) are seeing is real, supernatural, or a delusional illusion.
While one might wonder why a lodge at such a cold altitude is so spacious and therefore difficult to warm, the interior is complex and spacious enough to give Yamashita plenty of opportunities for creepy atmosphere. Likewise, it provides the characters with space for unpleasant games of hide-and-seek that turn into frantic attempts to inflict or evade serious bodily harm.
The two actors take separate journeys into hysteria, journeys that are well-crafted enough that we don’t care much about the subtleties of psychology or action. Confession maintains a self-conscious self-consciousness about being a cheap piece of work, even as it exploits the situation for copious amounts of tension, shock and black humor. There could have been more shock value to be extracted from the gradual reveal, but even then you can’t blame the director for wasting any opportunity in his tense progression.
First-rate contributions to elevating this small, harrowing story are the moody, elegant widescreen compositions by DP Shinya Kimura, and the unexpectedly large, symphonic soundtrack by Masa Takumi that flows between long periods of unsettling quiet.
