The Third Murder

In his more recent work, writer/​director Hirokazu Koree­da, the reign­ing genius of Japan­ese obser­va­tion­al cin­e­ma, has come down with a seri­ous case of the warm and fuzzies. In 2011’s I Wish, a pair of plucky, adorable young­sters run away from home to see the bul­let train; in 2015’s Our Lit­tle Sis­ter, three women find them­selves car­ing for their plucky, adorable sibling.

Even his last film, the com­par­a­tive­ly down­beat post-mar­i­tal dra­ma After the Storm, keeps the plucky, adorable child of divorce firm­ly in the cen­tre of the frame. None of which is remote­ly intend­ed as crit­i­cism: Koree­da deals with child­hood more con­vinc­ing­ly than any direc­tor this side of Shane Mead­ows, and I Wish is one of the most emo­tion­al­ly intel­li­gent and intense­ly mov­ing films of the past decade.

But per­haps it was time for a change. As the title implies, The Third Mur­der is a very dif­fer­ent propo­si­tion, a self-con­scious, rig­or­ous­ly con­trolled left-turn into a world of rough jus­tice, amoral legal­i­ty and trag­ic self-sac­ri­fice. Shot in shades of chi­na white and cloudy grey and backed by a chim­ing, insis­tent piano score, this is about as warm and fuzzy as a snapped icicle.

It begins with that epony­mous homi­cide, as age­ing ex-con Mis­u­mi (Kôji Yakusho) whacks his boss repeat­ed­ly over the head with a mon­key wrench and sets fire to the corpse. His request­ed lawyer Shige­mori (Masa­haru Fukuya­ma, from Koreeda’s own Like Father, Like Son) turns out to be the son of the judge who put Mis­u­mi away for 30 years for the mur­der of two loan sharks.

But he’s deter­mined not to let his­to­ry affect his judge­ment, com­mit­ting him­self to get­ting a fair tri­al for his client. Though per­haps ​‘fair’ isn’t the cor­rect word: Shige­mori is one of those lawyers who’ll do any­thing – includ­ing ignor­ing vital evi­dence – if he can ensure that this self-con­fessed three-time killer escapes the death penalty.

He sets about his work with a detective’s zeal, dig­ging deep into Misumi’s past. But Shige­mori soon learns that noth­ing about this case is straight­for­ward: why was Mis­u­mi exchang­ing emails with his victim’s seem­ing­ly dis­traught wife (Yuki Saito), and why is their teenage daugh­ter Sakei (Suzu Hirose, the title char­ac­ter in Our Lit­tle Sis­ter) hang­ing around the crime scene? Why does the mur­der­er keep chang­ing his sto­ry, omit­ting or per­haps for­get­ting key details of the crime?

The result is a focused, painstak­ing and qui­et­ly angry autop­sy of the Japan­ese legal sys­tem, set­ting up a series of eth­i­cal quan­daries then pick­ing them apart with clin­i­cal pre­ci­sion. Is true jus­tice pos­si­ble when both the pros­e­cu­tion and the defence are only in it to win? In a cor­rupt soci­ety, might an appar­ent­ly immoral act – even mur­der – be moral­ly jus­ti­fi­able? And are some lives just not worth living?

Not every ele­ment of Koreeda’s foren­si­cal­ly con­struct­ed script fits togeth­er, and one twist in par­tic­u­lar feels poor­ly devel­oped and only mar­gin­al­ly con­vinc­ing. But the per­for­mances are pin-sharp – Fukuya­ma is espe­cial­ly impres­sive as the cyn­i­cal attor­ney who secret­ly longs to believe – and the pho­tog­ra­phy is sub­tly effec­tive, offer­ing strik­ing new angles on the creaky old through-the-glass prison inter­view set­up. The Third Mur­der may not send audi­ences out into the night with a spring in their step, but you’ll be turn­ing it over in your head for weeks.