Confessions

Today I am going to post a simple review of a Japanese movie called Confessions.

This movie is about a Junior high school teacher, Moriguchi Yuko, who annoced to her class one day that she will resign. She told her class that her daughter, Minami was killed by two students whom she named as Student A and Student B. As she goes on to describe the behaviours of the two students, the class realized that Student A was Watanabe Shuya while Student B was Shinomura Naoya. Knowing the fact that they will escape punishment as legal minors, she told the whole class that she had injected HIV virus from her late husband, into the packet of milk of the two students. Through this, she had sucessfully instilled fear not only to the two students but the whole class.

Ever since then, Shinomura Naoya refused to go to sch and locked himself in the room, fearing for his life. He did not bathe nor cut his hair, as to him these were signs that he is alive. The whole class also acted as if nothing had happened. Then came the new teacher who took over the class. He was very passionate about teaching and told the class that he was inspired to become a teacher due to the book written by Moriguchi late husband. But he failed to realise the reaction of the students especially the fear they had when he mentioned it. Without knowing Naoya situation, he encouraged the class to write encouraging messages to Naoya so that he will come back to school. Not only that he also asked another student, Kitahara Mizuki, to accompany him to visit Naoya. Naoya's mother was very grateful for the class effort in the messages. But she could not understand why did Naoya became even more deranged after seeing the messages. It was until very much later that the mother realized that there was a hidden message in the so called encoragment message, "Go to die murderer!" As time goes by Naoya became violent and hit here mother. One day, her mother could not take it and wanted to kill Naoya then commit suicide. During the struggle, Naoya overpowered the mother and killed her, while he was arrested for murder.

On the other hand, Watanabe Shuya continued to go to school as if nothing had happened. However, he became a target for bullying. One day he was forced to kiss with Kitahara Mizuki as she was the only one who did not bully him. Slowly, Mizuki grew feeling for Shuya and confessed that she is Lunacy who had killed her parents using poison. Shuya killed Mizuki after she confronted him for not facing his mother and had Oedipus complex.

At graduation, Shuya plants a bomb to kill himself and his classmates, but the bomb does not go off then receives a call from Moriguchi telling him she had moved the bomb to his mother's office, killing her instead. Moriguchi appears at the end, telling Shuya, overcome and humiliated was her revenge, and his redemption just begins, but she adds, "just kidding", referencing to what Shuya told her when he confessed that he killed her daughter.

What is interesting about the movie is the confession of Moriguchi. She did not carried any feeling while saying but still instill fear through her words. Also during the confrontation of crime, Shuya attitude of joking around was a point that everyone should take note of. In conclusion, this movie tells us that how powerful words can be. It is always important for us to look for the hidden meaning in a person message and also to take note of the other party behavior so that we will not misinterpret the situation.