The Third Murder is a rarity: a thriller that gets quieter as it approaches its denouement. The latest by newly prolific Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda isn’t up to the challenges set up by his script and his camera choices, but it represents another entry in a series of films about the wages of family.
At the beginning it doesn’t look complicated. In an open field, to the accompaniment of a rather cheerful score, Misue (Kōji Yakusho) bludgeons his victim to death with a wrench, dowses the corpse in gasoline, and sets it on fire (Kore-eda, with characteristic restraint, does not linger on the aesthetic possibilities of flame against dark night, of silhouettes against lit match). Even better for the purposes of police and state prosecutors, Misue admits his guilt. Nevertheless, he needs a defense team, and Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama) up to the task. Years ago his father, a retired judge, presided over Misue’s first trial for murder. Shigemori and his legal team’s task is to mitigate the likely death penalty; the Japanese legal system is inclined to show mercy if a grudge inspired a murder. Misue, he says, killed his boss to get money for his gambling debts. If so, why does another strand of evidence point to the widow’s ordering his death for insurance purposes? There’s a bigger problem: the alert Shigemori, who would make an excellent forensic psychologist, smells gasoline on the boss’ wallet, which would indicate that Misue purloined it after he burned the body.
Behaving as a whodunit in the traditional sense, The Third Murder spotlights people who admit to guilt for which there’s no proof and defendants whose reasons for accepting fate don’t gibe with that same proof. It’s no accident that Kore-eda lights and stages scenes with Shigemori’s teenaged daughter Yuka (Aju Makita) and the boss’ daughter Sakie (Suzu Hirose) so that the young women are interchangeable, creepy in their remoteness. “Somewhere in my heart I wanted someone to kill my father, and Misue figured it out,” Sakie tells Shigemori.
Using closeups for effective ends, Kore-eda demonstrates how far he’s come from Maborosi, the leisurely 1995 film about a widow who grieves more outwardly than the one in The Third Murder. Its use of precisely held static shots and acceptance of mysteries, also obvious in 2008’s Still Walking, had more in common with Taiwanese contemporaries like Tsai Ming-liang. But 2004’s Nobody Knows and 2013’s Cannes Jury Prize winner Like Father, Like Son, also starring Fukuyama, showed his knack for directing children (This year’s Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters opens in South Florida soon). Prolificacy has been good for Kore-eda. The exigencies of genre filmmaking tax his abilities, though; the squirrely performance of Yakusho, best known in America for 13 Assassins, enlivens his dialogues behind prison glass with Fukuyama, but like many things in The Third Murder they get repeated, like the scenes explaining what happened in the court that the audience has seen already. All of Kore-eda’s finely wrought modulations produce a picture whose intelligence at times softens into the inert.
Yet audiences should watch it anyway because Kore-eda hasn’t yet made an uninteresting picture. His talent for writing characters trapped by situational doublespeak remains intact. “Although we’re on different sides, we’re still on the same ship of justice,” a colleague of Shigemori reassures him. Keep telling yourself, buddy.
GRADE: B
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