General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Third Murder (三度目の殺人)

The Third Murder (三度目の殺人, Sandome no satsujin) is a 2017 Japanese legal thriller directed, written, and edited by Hirokazu Kore-eda, in which a defense lawyer representing a confessed murderer finds his certainty about the case, and his faith in the legal system, dissolving as the client's story keeps changing. It runs 124 minutes and was Kore-eda's first foray into the crime genre after a career centered on family drama.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer / editor	Hirokazu Kore-eda, from his own original screenplay¹^•³
Lead cast	Masaharu Fukuyama as lawyer Shigemori Tomoaki, Koji Yakusho as defendant Misumi Takashi, Suzu Hirose as Yamanaka Sae¹
Release	Premiered at the 74th Venice International Film Festival on September 5, 2017; Japanese theatrical release September 9, 2017⁴
Festival status	Main competition at Venice 2017 (Golden Lion nominee); screened at Toronto, San Sebastián, and Busan³^•¹
Japan Academy Prizes 2018	Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress²
Music / cinematography	Score by Ludovico Einaudi; cinematography by Kore-eda's regular collaborator Mikiya Takimoto³
US reception	87% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 83 reviews; limited US theatrical release July 20, 2018, grossing $89.3K⁵

Spoilers

Plot and premise

The film opens on Yokohama riverside wasteland at night, where a middle-aged factory worker, Misumi (Koji Yakusho), clubs his former boss Yamanaka to death and sets the body alight.⁶ Misumi, a repeat offender who served prison time for a murder thirty years earlier, is prosecuted for the third time in his life and readily confesses to the killing.⁷ Because he has confessed, his legal team's task is not to exonerate him but to challenge the charge of gōtōsatsujin, murder during robbery, in order to avoid a death sentence.⁷

The prominent attorney Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama), brought into the case by his senior colleague Settsu, investigates to secure a more lenient penalty. But Misumi repeatedly changes his story, and as Shigemori hears testimony from the victim's family and from Misumi himself, the once confident lawyer begins to doubt whether his client is the murderer at all, and eventually questions his own faith in the law.²^•⁸ One version of Misumi's testimony denies any murder at all.⁹ The director spends the film slowly demolishing the certainty the opening scene appears to establish about what was done, by whom, and why.¹⁰

Themes and the director's intent

Kore-eda has said the film grew out of advice from lawyers who worked as legal supervisors on his earlier film Like Father, Like Son (2013): "Court is not the place to determine the truth," they told him, and nobody could know the truth. His response was to make a legal drama in which the truth is never revealed; only the judgment procedure concludes while the characters never see the truth. He described the implication as a society that condones an imperfect system in which people must judge other people without knowing the truth, a realization he thought would terrify the protagonist.³

Critics have read the film as a critique of the Japanese legal system, in which the scales are tipped in favor of the prosecution, and of how judgment is cast on others.⁷^•¹¹ Shigemori's own line that "legal strategy is the truth" captures the film's distinction between moral truth and legal truth; on the wider question of who has the right to judge others, the film remains silent.¹⁰ Its title carries a double suggestion: Misumi's third prosecution, and the multiple shifting accounts of a single killing.¹²

Style and visual approach

Much of the action is seen through the glass partition of a jail interview room separating prisoner and attorney, an image the critic Jonathan Romney reads as the film's thesis: there are different truths to a legal case depending on which side of the glass you sit.⁶ In close-ups of the two men facing each other across the perspex screen, their profiles merge in reflections, one of the film's most unsettling touches.¹⁰ The image has also been read as an echo of the final scene of Akira Kurosawa's 1963 thriller High and Low, in which one critic sees the film as a theme-variation on Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), a crime story that refuses to reveal itself objectively.¹³

Ludovico Einaudi's piano and cello dominated score functions almost as a player in the drama, and Takimoto's widescreen cinematography is darkly distinctive, particularly in its charting of weather and landscapes.¹⁰^•³

Place in Kore-eda's career

Kore-eda, born in Tokyo in 1962, had built his reputation on empathetic observation of family relationships, from Maborosi (1995) through Like Father, Like Son (2013), which won the Jury Prize at the 66th Cannes Film Festival, and After the Storm (2016).¹⁴^•⁶ The Third Murder marked a deliberate shift into procedural crime territory more familiar from American film and television, though the director remained less interested in detective work than in the tangled web of relationships that crimes knit together.¹⁵ Reviewers were divided on the result: some reviews after the Venice premiere were dismissive, while later UK reviews were rapturous, and the Rotten Tomatoes critics' consensus holds that the film makes satisfying work of its weighty themes even if it does not quite stand with Kore-eda's best efforts.⁶^•⁵

The film was produced by Fuji Television, Amuse, and Gaga, distributed in Japan by Toho and Gaga, and sold internationally by Wild Bunch outside Asia. In early 2018 China's National Alliance of Arthouse Cinemas released it theatrically, the first time a Kore-eda film had a mainland Chinese theatrical release, and Film Movement released it in North America that summer.¹^•¹⁶

Reception and honors

Beyond its six Japan Academy Prize wins in March 2018, the film was nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice and received Asia Pacific Screen Award nominations for Achievement in Directing, Best Performance by an Actor, and Best Screenplay.²^•⁸ On Metacritic it scored 68, with 13 of 18 critic reviews positive and none negative; The Hollywood Reporter's Deborah Young called it a riveting legal thriller with the same clarity of thought and precision of image as Kore-eda's very best work.¹⁷ Its US release coincided with public debate in Japan over abolishing the death penalty, though the film declines to argue for either side of that debate.¹⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2015–2019 films › Thriller and mystery films › Titles O to Z

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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