Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita (“Linda Linda Linda”) was represented by no less than three features at Montreal’s Fantasia Fest this year, including anime “Ghost Cat Anzu” and high school seriocomedy “Swimming in a Sand Pool.” The shortest, most outwardly simple yet also possibly best of the lot might well be “ Confession ,” a manga adaptation in which two mountaineering refugees from a blizzard spend a long, discomfiting night in a cabin. The fact that one of them has just admitted to murder means that that particular type of crime could well recur before dawn arrives.
More or less a single-setting two-hander, this thriller proves a small master class in eking maximum value from a premise one might assume too limited to sustain more than a short’s length. It’s a sharply honed, pleasurably nasty cat-and-mouse thriller that could attract remake interest overseas. A brief prologue informs us that Sayuri (Nao Honda, seen in flashbacks) disappeared on a college hiking-club trek, her body apparently never found.
She’d formed an inseparable trio with now ex-boyfriend Asai (Toma Ikuta) and Korean exchange student Jiyong (Yang Ik-june); since then, the two men have annually climbed the same mountain in her memory. Sixteen years later, that tribute has taken a dire turn — Jiyong is injured in an apparent fall amidst freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall. Having no idea how far they remain from reaching shelter, he decides he’d rather give up, sayin.