Confessions/Kokuhaku

YUKO MORIGUCHI’S rowdy charges aren’t paying too much attention when the exasperated schoolteacher (the sublime Takako Matsu) announces her impending retirement. They only simmer down as she outlines her dark reasons. Two of her 13-year-old pupils are responsible for the death of her four-year-old daughter, who recently drowned in the campus swimming pool.

The culprits are protected by Japan’s juvenile legal code, which allows criminals under 14 to escape punishment, leaving the bereaved mother to her own devices. She has, accordingly, equalised the situation by injecting her dead husband’s HIV-infected blood into the two killers’ milk. Let the games begin.

While the rest of the planet continues to regurgitate the tropes found in The Grudgeand The Ring, J-horror is moving onwards and upwards.

At first Confessionsseems to be just another approximation of its genre predecessors. Its heroine is out for vengeance; commonplace effects are invested with nasty, lurking surprises; sentimentality is juxtaposed with medieval-brand barbarism. Shot in oppressive, steely blues, it recalls the faux monochrome of the late-1990s rush of extreme Asian exports.

Confessions, however, mutates this familiar J-horror DNA into a new, socially aware breed. Director Tetsuya Nakashima is less concerned with the cycle of revenge than with the seemingly heartless monsters on the receiving end. The usual suspects are lined up. Divorce, tiger parents, a neglectful (working!) mother, excessive academic aspiration and old-fashioned exclusion make up the parade of mitigating factors without providing a satisfactory alibi.

Bullying, teenage alienation and peer pressure have long preoccupied Japanese film-makers, but the picture’s dispiriting, detailed depiction of callous youth and social dissolution has prompted a great deal of head-scratching and soul-searching among Japanese pundits and columnists.

In common with Gus Van Sant's Elephant, Larry Clarke's Bullyand Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou-Chou, this year's Japanese Academy Award contender reminds us that hell isn't other people; it's other teenagers. TARA BRADY