Critics reviews

When I watched it again, Kore-eda's surprises seemed less like a screenwriter's tricks than Dostoevskian revelations deepening everything that came before. Scenes that are tedious or familiar on first viewing become absorbing on the second, when you focus on small details that point to the characters' true selves.

The action pivots on the moral and practical differences between procedural justice and truth; despite some tense dramatic moments and some revealing views of Japan’s legal system, the movie feels plotted rather than experienced.

This isn’t the first time that Kore-eda has hinted at the mystical. (Let’s not forget, this is a man who made an entire movie about the afterlife.) But in The Third Murder, he does it in a glancing way — leaving the questions open-ended, hanging in the air — so that what emerges is an inquiry not into the divine, but instead into the mystery of human existence.

An elegant, commanding film, altogether engrossing, but not terribly affecting—and at the end, you’re not entirely sure what you’re coming away with. Perhaps what’s most fascinating about the work is that overall, it’s entirely atypical for Kore-eda, yet unmistakably a Kore-eda film in many ways.

At times, Mr. Kore-eda pushes too hard and overstates the obvious, as when he superimposes images of Misumi and Shigemori’s faces, as if to underscore that the two are more alike than not. He’s making a fine ethical point but it’s an overly blunt cinematic stroke. Far better is an earlier scene in which Shigemori and his daughter share little but a restaurant booth and their mutual estrangement.

At its best, The Third Murder exudes a sense of breezy heartbreak that's characteristic of the work of writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who uses a murder mystery as a springboard for another of his examinations of the Japanese caste system.

The twist is that the film isn’t so much an investigation into who committed the crime, as it is about why the perpetrator did it. It’s a professional bit of work, befitting Kore-eda’s status as the Ron Howard of the international festival circuit, but ultimately it shies away from the darkest potential of its material, the utter meaninglessness of justice, retreating into a cocoon of tasteful self-seriousness.

Koreeda uses the momentum of the genre to an unusual end, rejecting a satisfying conclusion for a complex moral conundrum... Sleek and suspenseful, deceptive and profound, The Third Murder is an artful addition to the canon of modern-day crime drama, one whose core mysteries encompass more than just the case at hand.

Although there are only two dream sequences in Hirokazu Kore-eda's The Third Murder, their jarring appearance produced such chills in me that I nearly felt sick. An endless lucid nightmare, The Third Murder buries itself deep into the law from the beginning to the end of a murder trial with so many turns that justice itself begins to feel as numbing and sunken as a bottomless pit.

Despite occasionally flashy moments, it's a soberly told tale, emphasizing characterization and social critique. By the end, Misumi acquires a weary, radiant dignity, while entrepreneurial capitalism and the justice system are revealed as compromised... In moving to the sordid terrain of the crime story, The Third Murder shows that Kore-eda hasn't given up his sympathetic probing of human nature and his praise for un-grandiose self-sacrifice.

There are plenty of allusions to Kurosawa's Rashomon in The Third Murder, as Kore-eda constantly blurs the facts around the film's eponymous assassination, leaving one with the frustrating feeling the deceased's young daughter Sakie (Kore-Eda's regular Suzu Hirose) perceptively nails at the end of the film: "nobody here tells the truth." Unsettling as it may be, the impossibility of knowing the real version (and motives) behind the crime is The Third Murder's greatest merit.