Not The Seth Rogen One

Going into The World's End, I had an unshakeable hunch that the movie I was about to see was not the one that most people were expecting. It's reasonable to expect that director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's follow-up to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, two of the funniest movies of their decade, might be similarly hilarious. And yet, going in, I couldn't shake the feeling that the new movie wasn't going to be very funny at all.

I am grateful for that hunch, because it turned out to be exactly right: The World's End is not very funny, and  in fact it's not really a comedy at all. There are maybe a dozen moments in the whole film that I found myself laughing out loud, and I think I laughed more often than anyone else in the cinema. So no, The World's End is not as funny as Shaun or Fuzz, but to get hung up on that is to risk missing the important fact that it is perhaps better than either of them. Which is, disappointing though the shift in tone and focus may be, ultimately the most important thing to take away from it.

I'm loathe to give away much if any of the movie, but it's difficult-unto-impossible to discuss what the film is and how it differs from its predecessors without at least talking about the first act, so here goes. Gary King (Pegg) dreams of a night in 1990 when he and five friends unsuccessfully attempted the "Golden Mile", a pub crawl that went through all twelve pubs in their hometown. Now entering his forties, Gary still considers that night the best of his life, but forever regrets not making it to the final pub on the route, The World's End. Hellbent on both conquering the challenge and recapturing the memories, he rounds up his old gang to take on the Mile once more. None of his old friends are very happy to see him again, least of all his once-best friend Andy Knightley (Frost), but all of them reluctantly agree to join him, if only to get him out of their hair once and for all.

Reunited, the gang returns home to find that the town has changed, and that Gary very much hasn't. He still treats his friends like props, squashing their feeble attempts to make the best of the night in the name of doggedly trying to repeat the past. Everyone's just about fed up only a few pubs in, when something happens that changes the course of the entire night. I won't say what, but where Shaun and Fuzz set their sights on zombie movies and buddy cop action respectively, The World's End is a science fiction film, specifically an alien invasion one. It's also a stunningly clever film, stuffed with grace notes that are sure to make repeat viewings satisfying for years to come. That much is to be expected of its pedigree, but what truly blindsided me is how biting the new film is. In place of jokes, The World's End has an abundance of complex, adult characters with very real problems and an array of themes that are expressed thoughtfully and (mostly) subtly.

There are two very important differences to this scenario as compared to the setups for the other two Cornetto films (for that is how the trilogy is collectively known): The first is the protagonist. While the slackers played by Pegg and Frost in the first two films were nobody's idea of a perfect human being they were likeable enough, and shaped by the actors and director with enough affection, that spending two hours with them in a silly comedy wasn't a hard ask. Gary, though, is too far gone to earn that kind of affection. He's too old, too desperate not to move on when everyone else has. He's pathetic, in a way that is far too raw and just plain sad to be funny. Pegg and Wright (who also wrote the script together) know this, and they are completely uncompromising - though not unsympathetic - in portraying him.

The second thing is that it takes a shockingly long time for the genre elements to rear their heads here. I didn't time it, but I'd estimate that things don't even begin to heat up until the thirty- or forty-minute mark of a film that comes in at a tidy 109 minutes total. This means that we spend an awfully long time in the company of Gary and his estranged friends before the carnage begins, and everything that happens afterwards is grounded by that first act. On top of that, the generic elements of the movie are far more subdued here than ever before. There are references aplenty, but they fade into the background , except where they intersect with the film's themes, or during its many action sequences. Gary may not be the biggest complication in his friends' lives any more, but they and the audience are never allowed to forget that their predicament is ultimately his fault.

The action sequences are, incidentally, fantastic. I run more cold than hot towards Wright's last film as director Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but one thing it had in abundance were dazzling and well-staged CGI-enhanced fight scenes, and the ones here more than live up to that standard. Wright has always been a smart director, and his instincts have never been sharper. His signature attention-grabbing editing motifs are back and better than ever, married to some truly beautiful cinematography by Bill Pope that takes on many distinct forms throughout the film, every one of them perfectly attuned to the emotional needs of the scene.

There are really only two things that I can really think of to say against the film. One of them is contextual; it simply does not feel of a piece with the other two Cornetto films, and there are enough deliberate callbacks that you can't entirely keep those films out of your head while watching. The other, and regrettably more serious flaw is the ending. It's not even that it's bad, as such, just that it doesn't feel like part of the same film, tonally or thematically. It's possible that I missed something, but I could not square the final moments of the film with everything that had gone before, and it left things on a slightly deflated note.

Still and all, The World's End is as fine a piece of popcorn entertainment as we've seen in this admittedly somewhat impoverished Summer season. Fun and fast-moving enough to never feel draggy, but rooted enough in intelligent and subtle characterisation to be satisfying and meaningful long after its fizzier pleasures have faded away.

8/10

It Came From Beneath The Sea

Guillermo del Toro's latest directorial effort Pacific Rim is that most frustrating of good movies: the kind that could have been immeasurably better with very little effort at all, and no matter how enjoyable it may be (which is frequently very much in this case) that enjoyment is forever shadowed by the even better version of the film lurking just out of sight.

Pacific Rim, is about giant robots, giant monsters and the point where those two things intersect violently. Very little time is wasted in establishing this: two title cards give us the names and definitions of the Kaiju (the monsters, so named for the Japanese genre films from which Godzilla and company hail) and the Jaegers (the robots), our protagonist Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) talks us through the early years of the human-Kaiju war and the creation of the Jaegers over a whirlwind of news footage, a short fight scene whets our appetite and establishes the tragic death of Raleigh's brother Yancy (Diego Klattennhoff), then it's off to the races.

Except not quite. It's at this point that the film brings us into its present day in 2025, and things slow down for a good while. After his brother's death Raleigh has resigned from pilot duties and turned to working for rations where he's found by general Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), who pulls him back into the fold to pilot his old Jaeger, one of only four left in the world after the Kaiju redoubled their efforts to wipe out the human race. He's brought to the Jaeger program's last outpost in Hong Kong, where he meets the other remaining pilots as well as Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), a pilot-in-training whom he immediately develops an interest in (although not, blessedly, a romantic one). What follows is 45-odd minutes of life at the base, intercut with a comic B-plot revolving around Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day), an obsessive Kaiju fanboy and his quest to acquire an intact Kaiju brain from Hannibal Chau (del Toro stalwart Ron Perlman), a black-market Kaiju organ dealer.

The script for Pacific Rim (co-written by del Toro and Travis Beacham) is not short on flaws. The dialogue is wooden and only comes in "expository" and "forced levity" varieties, exacerbated by the fact that, with the exception of a single speech that was in all of the trailers anyway, it's consistently doled out inversely relative to the talents of the actors it's given to. The biggest problem, though, is that Raleigh is just a godawful protagonist. Hunnam's performance is completely blank, and the character gets little to do except quarrel with the Australian Jaeger pilots (Max Martini and Robert Kazinsky, who owe the entire country an apology for their accents) and be generally surly. He's a big old heaping of vanilla all over the film, smothering the otherwise light tone and weighing down the early going with endless scenes of empty moping. He's not even enough of an inexperienced blank slate to serve any kind of audience-identification purpose, so we end up far more in tune with the greener Mako than we ever do with Captain Whitebread.

It's not hard to envision a version of the movie where Mako, who has just as much of a history with the Kaiju and a far more interesting relationship with Pentecost, among other things, is the protagonist and Raleigh is relegated to a supporting role or scrapped entirely, and it's this that I had in mind when I suggested that the film could have been easily and significantly improved. The removal or sidelining of Raleigh may not have resulted in the best possible version of Pacific Rim (which to my mind would need to have been made with rubber suits and miniature sets) but it would have resulted in a Pacific Rim with more clarity of purpose, better characterisation and a running time that came in a good 20 minutes shorter.

If Pacific Rim is too hamstrung by its weak script to ever be considered amongst del Toro's best work, it's perhaps even more of a testament to his abilities as a director than some of his better films, because he saves much more of the material from itself than I would have thought possible. Starting from a breathtaking opening shot where the night sky turns into the deep ocean, the film is stuffed full of some of the most memorable imagery to play on screens this year, albeit not quite as much as a Hellboy II or a Pan's Labyrinth. Even when he's not straight-up showing off, he keeps the film operating at a level of visual splendour that keeps the worst elements of the script at arm's length - I'm particularly fond of a visual motif involving various particles drifting in a blanket across the screen. An extended flashback to Mako's childhood should be excruciating on paper (and it still is a little, but only due to the unwelcome presence of Raleigh, The Beigefather) but in del Toro's hands it's a small masterpiece of poignancy married with visceral terror, and grounds the entirety of the monster action in the rest of the film with a sense of scale and genuine stakes.

Visually the film only has one real flaw, but it is admittedly a serious one: the Kaiju are simply not interesting to look at. This is disappointing (to put it mildly) coming from a director who has spent much of the last ten years gracing us with some of the most inspired and memorable movie monsters to grace the screen since movie monsters went out of fashion, and especially from that director's self-proclaimed love letter to the iconic B-movie monsters of yore. For starters, the monsters of Pacific Rim have a worrying tendency to disappear into the backgrounds of low-lit scenes, and since we only ever see them attack at night that's very nearly all the scenes they appear in. Even more disheartening is how interchangeable the whole lot of them are; a late fight scene features a Kaiju who we are assured in dialogue is the Biggest Baddest Most Threatening Kaiju Of Them All, and I could not for the life of me tell you which of the three on-screen monsters it was supposed to be. I also would have personally preferred that the entire species' unifying aesthetic couldn't have been quite as easily summed-up as "like the Cloverfield monster, but with glowing neon bits", but that much at least is a matter of taste.

Ultimately, though, the Kaiju are there to have the holy hell beat out of them by giant robots, and Pacific Rim delivers on that front far more successfully than its uninspiring marketing campaign had led me to expect. There is a weight and a "crunchiness" to the setpieces that is all too often absent from CGI-dependent blockbuster movies. That, coupled with a childlike sense of glee and an uncommon dedication to preventing civilian casualties gives the action a giddy thrill that secures it firmly near the top of the 2013 Summer season. Six years after Michael Bay seemingly ruined the concept for everyone in Transformers, we at last have a CGI-age giant robot picture that delivers on the promise of that concept. It's far from perfect but it's a it's a wholly successful proof-of-concept, and hey, that's what sequels are for, right?

7/10

I'm No Superman

With Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" trilogy all wrapped up and Marvel's film division absolutely monopolising the "fun" corner of the comic book adaptation market, Warner Brothers has turned its eye to dark-and-edgifyin' another iconic DC superhero. The result, in case you've been living under a rock for the last year, is Man of Steel, and it is a complete and utter failure of a motion picture.

Man of Steel more-or-less follows the template set by the marvelous Superman: The Movie back in 1978, with a few changes both major and minor to bring it in line with modern sensibilities (or more accurately, a film executive's idea of modern sensibilities), and a few more just for the hell of it - nearly all of them for the worse. It begins as that film did with a lengthy prologue set on the alien planet of Krypton, where leading Kryptonian scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) has failed to prevent the planet's imminent destruction. The only hope left for the survival of the Kryptonian race lies in he and wife Lara Lor-Van's (Ayelet Zurer with the absolute worst performance in the film, all glassy-eyed stares and stilted line deliveries) infant son Kal-El, who is sent away to Earth despite the best efforts of mutinous General Zod (Michael Shannon, whose performance is typically unhinged but distressingly free of nuance), who kills Jor-El in the process. For his crimes, Zod and his most loyal officers are banished shortly before Krypton is destroyed.

In the first of many abrupt shifts in the story, we find ourselves in the company of the adult Kal-El (Henry Cavill) on Earth, now rechristened Clark Kent, who is disillusioned with his life and searching for any trace of his Kryptonian heritage. For the next hour and change Clark's childhood in rural Kansas with adoptive human parents Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane respectively) is doled out piecemeal via flashback, inserted crudely into the present-day narrative at seemingly random intervals. As if this weren't fractured and aimless enough, we're also introduced to investigative reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams), who crosses paths Clark at a US military dig site in Canada and becomes determined to find out more about him. Fractured and aimless it is, but this first act is still home to the majority of Man of Steel's best moments. Adams's Lois Lane is the only wholly successful modern update to the material, and if she is thus given appallingly little to do in exchange, she at least walks out with her dignity intact. The "Clark's childhood" material, meanwhile, is home to many terrific tiny character moments between the young Clark (played at 9 by Cooper Timberline and 13 by Dylan Sprayberry) and his parents. Lane is a perfect emotional anchor and remains so throughout the film, while Costner is nearly good enough to make the severe character missteps in the script actually work out in his favour.

Ah, yes, here is where things get really thorny. Starting with scriptwriters David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan's (who also produced) decision to render Jonathan Kent as a far more morally grey and distant role model for the young Superman, Man of Steel embarks on a voyage that ends in the total character assassination of its hero. Towards the end of the first act things seem to be headed for something of a course correction: Clark is reunited with his biological father in the form of a holographic projection, who at least pays lip service to the notion that people are capable of greatness and that Superman's most important power is to unite them in reaching it, through dialogue that is largely taken from Superman's more iconic comic book outings. Indeed, a genuinely compelling middle act starts to take shape where this more troubled  version of Superman learns to love and trust the people of America and offer his services as their protector before that trust is tested in a huge way.

I was fully prepared to start really liking the film at this point, but then it chooses to sidestep having a middle act entirely. Instead the running time is given over over to the third act, nearly a full hour of relentless and desperately uninteresting action sequences. Many things explode, many buildings crumble, entire city blocks are laid waste, an unthinkable level of human life is wiped out, and Superman apparently does not give a shit. Here is where it becomes abundantly clear that Goyer and Nolan don't understand or care about a single fucking thing that they said earlier in the movie. Their Superman blithely decimates nearly an entire city without batting an eyelid, happily writing off any loss of life as necessary collateral damage to defeat the bad guy, and oh boy does "defeating the bad guy" take on a meaning that would ordinarily only be allowed to do so over Superman's dead body (as it does, literally, at one point in the comics).

Man of Steel is terrible Superman, then, but bad adaptations are often good cinema in their own right, which is ultimately their only responsibility. This particular adaptation, unfortunately, is not good cinema by any definition that I'm comfortable using. It borrows liberally and without thought or skill from Nolan's Batman films, all slate greys and jerky camera movements (a particularly awful shot during the Krypton sequence crash zooms in, then out, then in again in a single take) and frantic editing, without any consideration to why those films used that aesthetic the way they did. Where Nolan had an eye for physical plausibility and practical effects, keeping the action contained to a human-level idea of "large", Man of Steel is operating in a far grander register of giant shiny spaceships and cities being levelled and civilizations facing extinction; a register that is entirely incompatible with the gritty pseudo-realism of the visuals. On top of this, almost every scene is rotten with lens flares that would make JJ Abrams blush at the freedom with which they are allowed to obfuscate the on-screen action.

All of this is to say that it's director Zack Snyder's finest work since his 2004 debut, Dawn of the Dead. Hideous though the visuals might be, they are in every way an improvement on his last four efforts. Slate grey is an improvement over orange and teal, crash zooms and shaky-cam are preferable to pervasive speed ramping, and so on. What's more, he portrays the deaths of Superman's parents with a callous disinterest, expecting the cloying soundtrack to do the emotional heavy lifting. Not something that any director should be proud of, for sure, but for Snyder it represents the first and only time that he has successfully portrayed violence and mayhem without actively fetishising it, in Man of Steel or any other film. The film is not entirely free of directorial dick moves - a stupid gesture involving herds of CGI African fauna nearly scuttle what is otherwise the film's most (and only) successful feint towards spectacle, and there's a fantasy sequence involving Zod and Supes that is a fucking disaster of the heavy-handed visual metaphors and subsequent masturbatory wallowing that are a pervasive element of Snyder's back catalogue.

I understand (though I also reject) the desire to update Superman to appeal to a modern, more cynical audience, but what we have in Man of Steel is scarcely worthy of the name (not that it seems to want it; "superman" is used only twice in the film, and only mockingly at that). It's both morally and visually ugly, so larded up with expensive CGI and self-concious attempts to ape other contemporary superhero films that it aged more in the time it took me to leave the cinema than its forebear has in 35 years.

4/10, and it owes its supporting cast a hell of a lot for that

Something Something Black Sabbath Lyric

I can't be the only one suffering from Marvel fatigue by now, surely? I understand that they want to establish a consistent brand, but the fact that they've functionally remade Iron Man five times now with varying quality of acting and humour has well and truly worn thin. That said, the acting and humour are the best they've ever been in Iron Man 3, so consider that a recommendation if you're still thrilled at the thought of yet another entry in Marvel's long line of highly competent and deeply anonymous blockbuster filmmaking.

The acting and the humour really are top-notch, actually. Iron Man 3 trades the first two films' director Jon Favreau (who still puts in an appearance as Happy the overbearing security guard) for Shane Black, who also wrote the screenplay. Black previously collaborated with Iron Man 3 star Robert Downey Jr. on the wonderful Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, where their personalities as director and actor were seemingly a perfect fit. If nothing else, Iron Man 3 proves that it wasn't a fluke - Downey Jr. hits a new peak as Tony Stark here, after coming off as a little disenchanted with it in The Avengers, while Black's acidic wit hasn't dulled at all (although it has been reined in; this is a PG-13 blockbuster).

Iron Man 3 opens with its absolute worst gesture: we're dumped in the middle of a flashback to 1999, being narrated by present-day Tony Stark. Flashbacks and voice-over are lazy storytelling at the best of times, but here it's only used to crudely insert a new villain into Tony's past for no reason that is ever satisfactorily paid-off. Why does Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) have to have crossed paths with Tony Stark prior to the present-day events of the movie? It never really ends up informing either character's motivations. Things pick up after that, at least. The voice-over is quietly taken out the back and shot while we catch up with Stark after the events of The Avengers. Things haven't been going too well - he can't sleep and he's been plagued by anxiety attacks ever since, and it's straining his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Meanwhile, America is being hit with a rash of terrorist attacks masterminded by the Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley), and no-one can quite figure out how he's doing it. Eventually he ends up on the wrong side of Stark's ire, but before Stark can take action his home is destroyed and he's sent on the run, without his expensive toys to back him up.

That's about as far as the plot can be synopsised without hitting spoiler territory. More than anything else, the plot of Iron Man 3 is characterised by shocking reveals, and it doesn't work at all. Putting aside the issue of predictability (I don't think I was ever less than two reveals ahead of the plot, your mileage may vary), it does awful things to the central conflict, or lack thereof. For most of its 135-minute running time, Iron Man 3 suffers from a distinct lack of a central villain, and it feels like there's a new (or a new old) one every ten minutes. Which is only compounded by the fact that none of the antagonists has much of a distinct personality, aside from Mandarin, who is entirely a gimmick.

At least the tone is mostly light. It's jokier than Iron Man 2, and probably the first film as well, and it stops the plot from getting too bogged down in its murky wheel-spinning. Eventually it culminates in an explosive climax, as these things do, and... Well, there's not a lot to say. The action is as it always has been. Did you enjoy the CGI-driven aerial combat in Iron Man and The Avengers? This is more of exactly the same. As someone who didn't, Iron Man 3 did not make me a convert. It's not a coincidence that the best film released under Marvel's studio to date is Captain America, which also had by far the smallest scale action, and it's telling that the best parts of this film are those in which Tony is robbed of his suit. Unfortunately, this only makes up about five minutes of the movie.

That's a lot of words spent discussing a movie that everyone already knows if they want to see or not. It's neither a disastrous misfire or a shot in the arm*. It's fun, in a very minor way, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit happy to see the back of it.

6/10

*At this point into the current superhero film cycle, I would welcome either with open arms.

Crood Humour

The Croods is a fucking ugly movie.

There's no other way to put it, and it's something that the movie is never able to fully recover from. Dreamworks animation have a storied history with regards to visual fidelity, with their previous films ranging from unspeakably hideous to kind of okay. The Croods is pretty uneven itself - many of the environments (quite a few of which are, admittedly, actually paintings) are quite lovely indeed, the menagerie of bizarre pseudo-prehistoric animals are a little less so, and the human characters are... well, there's where things get rocky. Bad enough that they should have the Dreamworks standard-issue waxy skin, but the poor humans in this movie suffer from a virtually never-ending series of afflictions: their hair is rendered in immobile  blocks that sit about a centimetre off their scalps, their teeth seem to float inside their mouths, their bodies don't respond to light and shadow properly, and they perpetually seem to be floating just a little bit in front of the frame. All this on top of character designs that already overshoot a comical idea of cavemen right into lumpy, inhuman flesh-things. I have no idea if it was the complicated production history (this began life as an Aardman project) or something else entirely, but The Croods does not for one second look like a 135 million dollar motion picture.

I make such a big deal of this not to condemn the film, however, but to commend directors Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco for making a film that ends up managing to be pretty damn good in the face of one of the most crippling flaws any film could be saddled with. Sanders, as we know from Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon (both of which he co-directed with Dean DeBlois, who sat this one out in favour of helming a sequel to HTTYD) is a fairly wonderful director of animation, capable of balancing tone, keeping the pace lively and engineering physical comedy with great panache. The Croods is not as fine as either of those movies, but it still makes for very light, breezy family entertainment - and it's at least more even than HTTYD, which I found had a deathly boring stretch towards the end.

The Croods centres on a primitive family - the Croods of the title - who live a quietly conservative existence out of their tiny cave. The family patriarch Grug (Nicolas Cage, choosing to behave himself) keeps his wife Ugga (a woefully underused Catherine Keener), mother-in-law (Cloris Leachman) and three children - son Thunk (Clark Duke) and daughters Eep (Emma Stone) and Sandy (Randy Thorn) - safe through constant fear and intimidation, treating anything new or unusual as life-threatening. Most of the Crood family isn't thrilled with this way of life, but it keeps them from going the way of their deceased neighbouring families, and that's good enough for them. Eep, however, chafes under her father's strict rules and longs to explore the world outside the cave. It's on one such sojourn that she runs into Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a more evolved kind of caveman who comes bearing tidings of the end of the world. He ends up being right, and the Croods are forced out of their cave and into the big wide world. If you guessed that from this point they meet up with Guy, tensions run high, lessons are learned and family bonds are strengthened then you get absolutely nothing, because no shit they do.

It's a hoary old plot, alright, but it goes down more than well enough thanks to a few things. First and possibly most importantly, the voice cast is firing on all cylinders to make the Crood family dynamic feel real and lived-in - they're absolutely convincing as a family of people who have known one another for years and who deeply love and can't stand each other in equal measure. In addition to this, the exact moment the plot kicks into gear and gets familiar is also the moment that we get exposed to the greater world of The Croods, and it's a terrific work of art design. Not all the designs are perfect (in particular, I never really warmed to the sabre-toothed cat that crops up throughout the movie), but most of the flora and fauna that dot the landscape of the film are a delight to see come to life in all their warped, cartoon glory. Finally, the directors do an excellent job of establishing real stakes at the climax, and making the danger facing the characters feel clear and present at all times, enough so that the eminently predictable ending actually feels surprising and earned.

Really though, the plot just fades into the background most of the time. The tone of The Croods is one of light comedy at almost all times, and that works out just fine for it. It's mostly well-assembled and elaborate physical comedy, although all of the characters except Ugga get at least one or two moments to shine in the dialogue. Not all of the humour lands; some of the physical comedy descends into too-broad slapstick, and there is one deeply regrettable animal sidekick whose jokes all revolve around the grating anachronistic humour that has plagued Dreamworks animated films since time immemorial, but I was laughing out loud more often than not.

It's hard not to feel at least a little disappointed by The Croods, and it's definitely a step down from Sanders's previous work as a director, but that still leaves it plenty of room to be big, silly and hugely entertaining, as well as position it well above the heap in the Dreamworks back catalogue.

7/10

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

I find it difficult to speak with anything approaching objectivity towards Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2010 film Confessions. It is, in so many ways, another in a long line of grim, misanthropic anti-thrillers that many directors, like Austria's Michael Haneke, have been producing over the last decade. And yet, while I find most of those movies to range from hateful to begrudgingly admirable, Confessions straight-up blindsided me.

The movie begins with what is essentially a its own contained short film. It’s the end of term and Class B’s teacher, Ms. Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) informs her unruly class that she won’t be returning after break. As the ensuing celebration dies down, she starts to talk about the recent death of her 4-year-old daughter, which she reveals was caused by two of her own students. After the class is well-and-truly riled up, she reveals one final piece of information, a cruel trick that she has perpetrated on the culprits (you can find out the nature of said trick in almost any synopsis of the film, but it’s such an effective shock moment that I'm loathe to spoil it).

Only after this does the story proper, adapted by Nakashima from a novel by Kanae Minato, kick into gear. The rest of the movie takes the form of a series of overlapping spoken confessions by several of the students in Moriguchi’s class as the ramifications of her actions start to take hold. As with any such film, however, the machinations of the plot are simply a springboard, here for a film about the cruelty that children are capable of, and the adult behaviour that enables it - as well as questions about the value of human life and the morality of revenge, and an attack on Japan's laws about criminal offenders to boot. Questions which, of course, the film has no interest in providing answers for. So far, so much like any other grim, provocative art-thriller.

The key difference is, I think, that where so many of those other movies traffic in an aesthetic of cynical detachment, Nakashima is operating in a style that’s much more meditative and openly emotional. Instead of feeling clinical and airless, Confessions is moody and frequently melodramatic. Nakashima tends to crowd his mise en scène, bringing the characters’ emotions out into the film frame to surround them, and renders each confession as something of a tone poem. Aiding and abetting the visuals are a small handful of licensed songs, used and repeated with the precision of a bullet (the second appearance of Radiohead’s “Last Flowers” in particular destroyed me) to create a thick atmosphere of unreality.

This heightened reality serves a double purpose of creating an environment where the most histrionic parts of the screenplay and the more outlandish plot twists feel more plausible, as well as making the ideas in play that much more confronting and affecting. I haven't seen either of Nakashima's earlier cult-hit films Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, but my understanding is that Confessions is working on a totally different level to those movies, and doesn't seem to stem from his earlier work at all.

It’s true that after all this, up to and including its twisted punchline, Confessions only really adds up to so much provocation. But effective provocation has its place in cinema too, and Confessions is, as far as I'm concerned, effective and then some. It succeeded in utterly devastating me in spite of my instinctive resistance to material like this, and left me in a state of dumbfounded awe. And for that, I can only concede defeat to Tetsuya Nakashima and his tremendous suckerpunch of a film.