The Most Intricate Implementation of a Mother's Grief: Nakashima's Confessions (2010)

There is an ample amount of descriptive words to delineate the beauty and terror in Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2010 Confessions, but it is baffling to come up with exact singular or plural terms because the film is insurmountable by words, only through the inexplicable but genuinely felt sentiments can we convey its potency and devastating effects. Although his repertoire consists of magnificent films such as Kamikaze Girls (2004) and Memories of Matsuko (2006), there is little to no doubt that Confessions is Nakashima’s magnum opus and one of the greatest Japanese films ever made in the twenty-first century.

Confessions(2006) is a film that centres around revenge—a mother’s revenge to be precise—with elements of thriller and horror. One of the greatest examples of revenge trope in the history of fiction since Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1846), Confessions tells the story of a single mother who had her sole daughter murdered by two of her school pupils and how she avenges her daughter Manami’s death.

At the beginning of the movie, the audience observes an unruly and disobedient classroom which is managed by the same mother, named Moriguchi. Moriguchi claims that, to the elation of her pupils, she is quitting her post at the school by the end of the month due to the death of her daughter Manami. Although initially the police claim that the death of Manami was “accidental drowning” we later learn from her that there was a foul play at hand rather than it being an accident, and to our surprise, the culprits of the murder were her pupils. The students are seen drinking milk in the initial scenes of the film and Nakashima brilliantly connects this element to the flow of the story through Moriguchi’s search for revenge: the two culprits, Shuya and Naoki (both of them are called Student A and Student B in the beginning, respectively) are given milk which is infected with HIV blood, therefore, by consuming it, they are inflicted with the HIV virus. All of it is conveyed to both the pupils and the audience within the twenty-five-minute monologue of Moriguchi which is a very stark and strong introduction to a movie.

Her commencement of the revenge is rather indirect and psychological rather than physical or direct, possibly due to the fact that in the Japanese legal code these two culprits—since they are minors—cannot be convicted for the crime they committed and they can get away. After that the semester ends and the new semester begins but not without differences: Shuya becomes a victim of constant and excessive bullying and harassment while Naoki becomes extremely obsessed with his alleged disease and isolates himself from the rest of the world, at some point completely forgetting about his former self and personality. However, this is only the beginning of a mother’s revenge, the incomplete part of Moriguchi’s grand scheme is yet to be spun. 

At this point, it is crucial to introduce and explain the character of Shuya. Shuya is a smart and successful pupil with top grades, although he has a very dark side. Shuya uses his intellect and wits for harmful and murderous tendencies, all in an effort to gain the cognizance of his mother who had abandoned him when he was a kid in order to pursue her occupation. From that point, the entire psyche and personality of Shuya are obsessed over the fact of gaining approval from other people, especially from the mother, and feeling superior to other people because of his talents. This path leads him to murder both because he will become a sensation in the media and because he can get away from it under the Japanese legal code. Shuya is extremely manipulative and shows symptoms of narcissism and psychopathy—the manipulative side can be observed in his relationship with Mizuki, another pupil from the same class, and his murder accomplice (!) Naoki. Contrasting with Shuya’s antisocial tendencies, Naoki, on the other hand, suffers from unpremeditated asocial personality disorder, suggesting that he is unable to make friends. Shuya takes advantage of that in order to achieve his objective, wrecking and destroying the established image of friendship and comradeship in the eyes of Naoki as well as straying him further from the path of sanity to the point that Naoki keeps hallucinating Shuya’s harassment and bullying sessions.

The other manipulative relationship that he maintained for some time was with his ex-partner Mizuki. Shuya claimed in the testaments that he posts on the blog site that he used Mizuki just to kill time, although it proved later devastating for Shuya as well. With similar personalities and interests, the two hit it off nicely and positively at the end however this does not last for a longer amount of time because in the brief time that they had been together, Mizuki had gained resourceful insight pertaining to the personality and character of Shuya: she was the one that, for the first time, pointed out that the whole logic and reasoning behind Shuya’s entire existence was based upon mother complex, which resulted in her getting killed brutally by Shuya.

 The blog of Shuya is practically sustained as a means of obtaining his mother’s approval, perchance that his mother sees and recognizes his talent and wits. For this, Shuya designs a bomb to explode at a speech he is to give at the school podium, which will capture both the attention of the media and his mother—and subsequently both will, he thinks, applaud his genius. However, we have to return to our other later-turned-out-to-be genius Moriguchi. To thwart Shuya’s attempts to earn his mother’s respect and recognition, Moriguchi disarms the bomb—which she learns about the online statements Shuya publishes on his blog—and places it in his mother’s study at the university where she is working. When Shuya attempts to detonate the trigger of the bomb, it is not the school podium that explodes but his mother’s study, which he learns in the ending sequence of the film by Moriguchi. The film ends with Shuya running to his mother’s study and visualizing him with his paper clipping on the newspaper and looking proud, with tears on her face.

To finalize, Nakashima’s Confessions (2006) is an amazing movie that shows us how far the mother’s revenge goes. One of the most devastating films that one can experience in one’s lifetime, it is a movie about pain, suffering, devastation, loneliness, abandonment, and most importantly revenge. It is an underrated proponent of Japanese cinema and is a must-watch by enjoyers of the sophisticated and complicated thriller genre.