The New Japanese Film “Confession” Brings Back the Suspense Thriller, with a Twist

Released in Japan on May 31, with no US premiere set at time of writing, “Confession” (orig. “Kokuhaku: Confession”) is the latest film from director Nobuhiro Yamashita. Based on a manga by Nobuyuki Fukumoto and Kaiji Kawaguchi, it tells the story of two mountaineers caught in a snowstorm.

Dealing with a bad leg injury and thinking he’s about to die, one of the climbers, Ryu Ji-Yong (portrayed by Yang Ik-June), confesses to a murder from many years ago… right before his companion Keisuke Asai (Toma Ikuta) spots an empty mountain lodge, saving their lives. For a while at least. Because what happens when a confessed murderer becomes trapped in an enclosed space—with nobody else around for miles—with the only “witness” to his crime? What happens is the return of a genre that we sadly see very rarely these days: the suspense thriller.

Recently, these films have become such a rarity that if you were to ask a casual moviegoer what a suspense movie even is, most would probably say that it’s basically a story that keeps on the edge of our seats because all the terrible things that may happen onscreen. In short, to many, watching “suspense thrillers” means knowing as much or often less than the movie characters themselves. Yamashita quickly establishes just how wrong that definition is before seemingly changing his mind and then, finally, pulling the ultimate prestige of movie magic by reinventing the whole genre.

Eminent director Alfred Hitchcock called a film where the viewers know less than the characters a “mystery.” A “suspense” film is something else. He used to describe it with the following metaphor: “Four people are sitting around the table talking about baseball … Suddenly a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What do the audience have? 10 seconds of shock. Now, take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table and will go off in 5 minutes. Now the whole emotion of the audience is totally different because you’ve given them that information.”

Admittedly, “Confession” doesn’t feature a hidden bomb (if anything, the “bomb” is made obvious to Ji-Yong and Asai early on), but it gets to the heart of what Hitchcock was implying. By suddenly making Asai the most dangerous person to the prospects of a man who we know is capable of great violence, the movie makes every seemingly mundane interaction following the duo reaching the lodge into superbly tense storytelling. We know Ji-Yong won’t forget his confession or believe Asai when he promises he’ll pretend he didn’t hear anything, and that makes everything the former does carry an edge to it.

Memorably, it even elevates the confessor’s silence into a bone-chilling performance because it leaves us to assume that when Ji-Yong isn’t talking, he’s planning his second murder. And we’re of course right. Ji-Yong eventually attacks, and it happens fairly early in a film that’s only 74 minutes long. But it feels like FOREVER to get to it, which here is a massive compliment, thanks to the tense atmosphere made possible by the stellar performances of Ikuta and Ik-June. Then the movie does something different from the source material, deviating from the goal it seemingly set out to accomplish. If you really want to know what it was, just read the first letter of the 2^nd to 6^th paragraph in this article.

The “twist” does sort of ruin the enjoyment we’ve had from the suspense and the action scenes, seemingly putting “Confession” into a whole different movie category altogether… if it wasn’t for another revelation that not only gets the movie back on track, it puts a wonderfully fresh spin on the suspense thriller genre. I dare not spoil this bit in any way, but I’ll say that it’s essentially an in-film retcon. Once the movie is over, you’ll feel the immediate need to buy a ticket to the next viewing and watch “Confession” all over again, enjoying it anew based on the new information given to us, which, as we’ve established, is key to nailing a suspense movie.

Thanks to this, viewers essentially get two different movies with “Confession,” each one building its tension on tiny moments that only make your heart race because the movies has put them in proper, terrifying context. Alfred Hitchcock liked to put that context at the beginning of his stories. As did manga artists Nobuyuki Fukumoto and Kaiji Kawaguchi but then they put a bonus context near the end where we least expected it, and director Nobuhiro Yamashita expertly brought it to the big screen. Be sure to catch the movie once it comes out in the US and enjoy your two-for-one deal on modern suspense thrillers.