The Third Murder movie review (2018)

He makes it clear that this will be a human-driven murder story from the very beginning by showing us the crime. There’s no mystery as to whether or not Misumi (the amazing Kōji Yakusho, most well-known for “13 Assassins” in the States) killed his boss. We see it happen. Misumi strikes him in the back of the head with a hammer and burns the body. This might lead viewers to believe that the film to follow will be about a legal team suckered into helping acquit a guilty man, but that’s not this movie either. Kore-eda is much more interested in how the legal system often can’t hold up when cases get complex and emotionally fraught. It’s about the why of the murder that opens the film and not the who or the how. And it’s the why that’s the hardest for a legal system to take into account.

“The Third Murder” cuts to a famous attorney named Tomoaki Shigemori (the also-amazing Masaharu Fukuyama, who starred in Kore-eda’s “Like Father, Like Son”), who gets the Misumi case after his client has confessed. He killed him for money. He had some gambling debts and needed the cash. Immediately, something doesn’t seem right to Shigemori. The dead man’s wallet smells like gasoline, which means that Misumi took it after burning the body. Why would he do that if the money was his motive? And then Shigemori starts questioning some of the behavior of the people around the case, including the widow who may have had an insurance-driven motive to want her husband dead.

The first hour of “The Third Murder” is a fascinating procedural as the question of motive and some details about the Japanese legal system come to the fore. It turns out that the system is more lenient on grudge-based murder than that done for profit. In other words, if it was for money, Misumi could get the death penalty but wouldn’t if there was another reason for the crime. The question of why hovers in the air for that first hour as we watch Shigemori and his team get to the truth simply by doing their jobs very, very well. I’ve always been drawn to films that capture the process of an important job well done.

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