He already directed one of the best films of 2017 with After the Storm — now streaming on Amazon Prime — and now Hirokazu Kore-eda will continue his prolific streak with the legal drama The Third Murder. Starring Masaharu Fukuyama and Koji Yakusho, the Venice- and TIFF-bound film centers on a criminal trial about a defense attorney who unravels a bigger conspiracy when it comes to his client’s murder case. While this most certainly won’t get a U.S. release this year, fingers crossed we see it early in 2018 and now a new trailer has landed.
“The Third Murder takes us to numerous locales, but its most riveting scenes unfold within a tiny room where Misumi and Shigemori speak from either side of the glass,” the TIFF description reads. “At times these scenes are framed so that we see what lies on both sides of the glass at once. Like most of Kore-eda’s films, The Third Murder is a profoundly complex moral tale, so it is only appropriate that the director places his camera right in the centre of things. That’s where the heart is.”
See the trailer and poster below.
Leading attorney Shigemori takes on the defence of murder-robbery suspect Misumi who served jail time for another murder 30 years ago. Shigemori’s chances of winning the case seem low – his client freely admits his guilt, despite facing the death penalty if he is convicted. As he digs deeper into the case, as he hears the testimonies of the victim’s family and Misumi himself, the once confident Shigemori begins to doubt whether his client is the murderer after all.
The Third Murder premieres at Venice and TIFF.