Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita (“Linda Linda Linda”) was represented by no less than three features at Montreal’s Fantasia Fest this year, including anime “Ghost Cat Anzu” and high school seriocomedy “Swimming in a Sand Pool.” The shortest, most outwardly simple yet also possibly best of the lot might well be “Confession,” a manga adaptation in which two mountaineering refugees from a blizzard spend a long, discomfiting night in a cabin. The fact that one of them has just admitted to murder means that that particular type of crime could well recur before dawn arrives.
More or less a single-setting two-hander, this thriller proves a small master class in eking maximum value from a premise one might assume too limited to sustain more than a short’s length. It’s a sharply honed, pleasurably nasty cat-and-mouse thriller that could attract remake interest overseas.
A brief prologue informs us that Sayuri (Nao Honda, seen in flashbacks) disappeared on a college hiking-club trek, her body apparently never found. She’d formed an inseparable trio with now ex-boyfriend Asai (Toma Ikuta) and Korean exchange student Jiyong (Yang Ik-june); since then, the two men have annually climbed the same mountain in her memory.
Sixteen years later, that tribute has taken a dire turn — Jiyong is injured in an apparent fall amidst freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall. Having no idea how far they remain from reaching shelter, he decides he’d rather give up, saying “I deserve to die.” He admits to his old friend that he himself had strangled Jiyong to death, out of frustrated desire and jealousy, leaving her body in the wilderness.
Moments later it turns out that the desired mountaineers’ cabin is, in fact, just out of sight, around the corner. Asai manages to successfully wrangle his wounded friend inside, then light a fire. Once they’ve realized no one is going to expire in the cold, however, the awkwardness of that prior confession begins to sink in. Soon Jiyong begins to regret his candor, and Asai to fear his friend can’t let him live with the incriminating knowledge they now share. First expressed as mutual mistrust, then escalating violence, their death struggle is further complicated by an occasional hallucinatory quality. Despite his bum leg, Jiyong keeps disappearing and re-appearing with such jump-scare suddenness, we begin to wonder if what we (and Asai) are seeing is real, supernatural, or a paranoid delusion.
While one might question why a lodge at this frigid elevation would be so spacious, and thus hard to heat, that interior is complicated and expansive enough to give Yamashita with plenty of opportunity for spooky atmospherics. Likewise, it provides characters space for unpleasant hide-and-seek games that turn into frantic attempts at inflicting or or evading grievous bodily harm.
The two actors ably sustain separate journeys into hysteria, ones stylized enough that we aren’t much bothered by niceties of credible psychology or action. “Confession” retains a knowing self-consciousness about itself as a pulp contrivance, even as it succeeds in milking the situation for plentiful tension, jolts and black humor. There could have been a bit more shock value eked from the fadeout revelation, but until then you can’t fault the director for missing any opportunity in his taut progress.
Making first-rate contributions to elevate this grisly little tale are D.P. Shinya Kimura’s elegantly moody widescreen compositions, and an unexpectedly big symphonic score by Masa Takumi that surges between long stretches of queasy quiet.
