The Japanese are big fans of mysteries of the puzzle plot sort, with murders committed in the sorts of odd and ingenious ways that real killers seldom use. The detective hero not only cracks the case, but delivers a detailed post-mortem to an appreciative audience, somewhat like a chess master analyzing an opponent’s flawed middle game.
Based on a novel by Minato Kanae, whose fiction also inspired the hit 2010 film Confessions (Kokuhaku), Nakamura Yoshihiro’s new film The Snow White Murder Case (Shurayuki Hime Satsujin Jiken) would seem to be in this brain-teasing line.
First, there is the corpse of the lovely Miki Noriko (Nanao), found stabbed and charred in the woods of a national park. An OL (“office lady”) at a cosmetics company, she was renowned for her beauty, as well as rumored to be sleeping with her handsome, arrogant boss Shinoyama (Kaneko Nobuaki).
When a young director (Ayano Go) of a TV production house quizzes a former girlfriend (Renbutsu Misako) working for Noriko’s company about the case, she tells him her mousy colleague Jono Miki (Inoue Mao) was dating Shinoyama, who soon threw her over for the gorgeous Noriko.
He interviews others who know Miki, including a co-worker who saw her suspiciously running up the stairs of a train station the night of the murder. Afterwards, Miki stopped showing up for work, pleading a family emergency. How fishy is that? Believing he has a big, career-changing scoop, the director persuades his superiors to run the story on TV, igniting a media firestorm.
Trial and conviction by public opinion soon follow.
Since all this transpires in the first act, we understand that there has to be more to this story, but there is also no other suspect in sight. Who or what to believe?
The solution to this puzzle, however, is not the film’s only point. As in previous Nakamura films, such as the 2010 man-on-the-run thriller Golden Slumber or the 2009 SF/fantasy Fish Story, the twisty story serves as a vehicle for meditations on deeper themes, beginning with the elusiveness of truth and the importance of friendship. Not the Facebook “click-a-friend” type, but the sort of soul mating that withstands time, distance and circumstance, including accusations of murder.
Also, the all-wise all-explaining detective is nowhere to be seen. Instead the case against Miki, as well as the answers to the film’s various mysteries, emerges from a welter of testimony, as well as from a blizzard of comments on social media that fill frame after frame.
All this may sound very of-the-moment, not to mention confusing, but the film keeps the narrative lines clear and the focus squarely on flesh-and-blood people, not their digital avatars.
Nakamura also leavens the proceedings with his playful, biting sense of humor, mainly targeting the craven, opportunistic, anything-for-a-story mass media.
At the center of this blizzard of information (including the false clues) is the enigmatic figure of Miki, an awkward and isolated woman who is nonetheless described as having a dark power to hex her enemies – or perhaps kill them.
And yet in Inoue Mao’s finely calibrated performance, another Miki emerges whose sweetness and naïveté belie the terrible deed she is supposed to have committed. But her emotional volatility makes the insinuations of murder and even the power to hex her enemies somehow possible.
There is also the Noriko of fashion model/actress Nanao, towering like an office goddess over the likes of the lowly Miki, while dazzling men with her twinkly smile and statuesque looks.
Nakamura, however, presents her more from the perspective of her female co-workers, who shrink in the blaze of her beauty and arrogance and naturally resent her. If this Snow White could be revived by their kiss she’d have a long wait indeed.
Mark Schilling