My next door neighbor recently purchased a brand new coffee table, and it’s just fantastic. It’s sturdy, has a stunning finish and it fits his living room perfectly. Now that’s craftsmanship. But best of all it has a huge drawer inside that fits all of his board games perfectly. That, my dear friends, makes his coffee table special.
Confession, the new crime drama from Korean director Lee Do-yun, is a work of exceptional craftsmanship but it’s not terribly special. It’s a slick, skillful, razor blade of a crime thriller that gets the genre just right, but it does absolutely nothing to stand out from the other, better “what could possibly go wrong” movies like Blood Simple, A Simple Plan, No Country for Old Men and The Ladykillers (1955). Even though it’s technically more proficient than the lamer entries in the subgenre – Very Bad Things and Pain & Gain come to mind – it doesn’t make as much of an impact, if only because it doesn’t boast their infectious go for broke force of personality.
It’s unfortunate, because Confession gets the noirish recipe right, it just forgets to do anything of its own. The roller coaster ride of the perfect crime going awry, leading to one tragedy after another as the culprits strive to stay out of jail by any means necessary, works best when you don’t know when or how the next twist is coming. And there are very few twists in Confession that haven’t been done before, so it just doesn’t matter that Confession dramatizes them better than most.
Hyun-tae (Jee Sung), In-chul (Ju Ji-hoon) and Min-soo (Lee Kwang-soo) have been best friends since childhood. As adults, they couldn’t be more different: Hyun-tae is an honorable firefighter, In-chul is a shady insurance scammer, and Min-soo is a shiftless layabout. When Hyun-tae’s mother buys fire insurance from In-chul, and points out that her gambling casino is looking pretty flammable lately and wouldn’t it nice if she could just stay at home with her sick husband, In-chul and Min-soo scheme to burn the place down and make it look like a robbery. No one gets hurt, Hyun-tae’s mother gets the insurance money, In-chul and Min-soo take home the money from the safe and Hyun-tae finally gets his mother to retire from her life of shady business dealings.
They pull off the arson job perfectly and everyone goes home happy. Except the opposite actually happens. Someone dies and In-chul and Min-soo get stuck with a hefty dose of guilt and a ledger full of evidence that both the cops and the mafia want recovered. Will Min-soo let his morals get the best of him and fess up to Hyun-tae and the police? Will In-chul prevent his annoying girlfriend from catching wind of his newfound riches? Will everything just get worse and worse and worse and depressing as all hell?
You know the answers, and again, that’s the problem. Every dramatic shift in Confession comes across as an inevitability instead of a bombshell, which does give Lee Do-yun’s film a theatrically tragic mentality – the cast really does a wonderful job of playing their rapidly dissolving friendships for all the Shakespearean weight they can muster – but nevertheless robs the film of real momentum. That said, Hwang Chae-won does a splendid job of keeping his scenes as an opportunistic organized crime boss uniquely personable, but he’s the only x-factor in a film that otherwise lacks variables.
If you’ve never seen a film like Confession before, it will probably blow your mind. Lee Do-yun knows how this genre works and wrings every emotional beat dry, washing his film in effective melodrama so you can really appreciate all that shiny craftsmanship. But if you’ve seen it before, you’ll only be seeing it again. Just another coffee table. It’s well made, but beyond some fine performances and impressive cinematography, there’s nothing about Confession that makes it truly special. Fortunately, that’s a minor sin.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
