There are only a handful of directors that send me into uncontrollable giggles of excitement at the announcement of a new project. One of those is Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda, whose grounded, deeply human family dramas such as Nobody Knows, Still Walking, I Wish, Like Father Like Son, Our Little Sister, and his most recent, After the Storm (which I reviewed here) carry his signature voice. So it was more than a little surprising, and yes, very exciting to find out he would be moving to the thriller genre for his latest film, The Third Murder, and now we're getting a look at it.
A thirty-second teaser has arrived and it's tough to tell how much of a departure it truly is. In some of the individual shots I see the potential for this to resemble Koreeda's calm, economical pacing rather than the pulse-pounding style of thriller we're accustomed to here. The film stars Like Father Like Son's Masaharu Fukuyama as a high-powered, win-at-all-costs lawyer who takes on the case of an ex-con charged with murder for a second time. Koji Yakusho plays the accused man, while Koreeda has filled the supporting cast with some familiar faces.
The Third Murder opens in Japan on September 9th, and eventually it will find a way here like all of Koreeda's movies do eventually.
