is a 2017 Japanese
legal thriller film edited, written, and directed by
Hirokazu Kore-eda
is a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor. He began his career in television and has since directed more than a dozen feature films, including '' Nobody Knows'' (2004), '' Still Walking'' (2008), and '' After the Storm'' ( ...
. It was screened in the main competition section of the
74th Venice International Film Festival
The 74th annual Venice International Film Festival was held from 30 August to 9 September 2017. The jury president was announced as the actress Annette Bening on 5 July 2017. '' Downsizing'', directed by Alexander Payne, was selected to open ...
.
Plot
Tomoaki Shigemori is a lawyer tasked with defending a client (Misumi), who faces the death penalty if found guilty, in a murder trial. Misumi has previous convictions for murder and has confessed to the crime, but evidence in the case leads to Shigemori having doubts about what really happened.
Cast
Production
Hirokazu Kore-eda was inspired to write a courtroom thriller after conversing with his friend, a lawyer, about the latter's experiences in court. Kore-eda learned that there's a gap between the Japanese people's perception of the court as a space where people aim for the truth, and what it actually is: a space for lawyers "to make adjustments to the conflict
finterest." Kore-eda based the background of his script on the speculation of "what would happen if a lawyer really started wanting to know the truth?"
During the development process, writing the script was the hardest part for Kore-eda to tackle, due to his unfamiliarity with how lawyers worked in the justice system. He brought together seven lawyers over several months to stage mock trials and mock interviews of a criminal, while he took notes on their language and thought processes.
Besides the subject matter, another departure for Kore-eda was the film's use of the
Cinemascope
CinemaScope is an anamorphic lens series used, from 1953 to 1967, and less often later, for shooting widescreen films that, crucially, could be screened in theatres using existing equipment, albeit with a lens adapter. Its creation in 1953 by ...
format, which he had not employed in his previous films.
Reception
Critical reception
On review aggregator website
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...
, ''The Third Murder'' holds an approval rating of 87% based on 83 reviews, with an average rating of 7.05/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "''The Third Murder'' makes satisfying work of its weighty themes, even if it doesn't quite stand with writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda's best efforts." On
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
, the film has an average score of 66 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Deborah Young of ''
The Hollywood Reporter
''The Hollywood Reporter'' (''THR'') is an American digital and print magazine which focuses on the Cinema of the United States, Hollywood film industry, film, television, and entertainment industries. It was founded in 1930 as a daily trade pap ...
'' gave a positive review of the film, stating that "though different in feeling from the Japanese writer-director's perceptive family tales like ''
After the Storm'', it has the same clarity of thought and precision of image as his very best work."
Ben Sachs of the ''
Chicago Reader
The ''Chicago Reader'', or ''Reader'' (stylized as ЯEADER), is an American alternative weekly newspaper in Chicago, Illinois, noted for its literary style of journalism and coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater. It was founded by a ...
'' gave the film four out of four stars, stating that upon a second viewing, "Kore-eda’s surprises seemed less like a screenwriter’s tricks than Dostoevskian revelations deepening everything that came before."
Accolades
References
External links
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2017 films
2010s legal films
2010s thriller films
Japanese courtroom films
Films about lawyers
Films about rape
Films directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
Films scored by Ludovico Einaudi
Films set in Tokyo
Incest in film
Japanese thriller films
Legal thriller films
Japanese vigilante films
2010s Japanese films
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