Why does the law consider it worse if you kill for money than if you kill for revenge? Is ignoring a crime a crime unto itself? Is it at all relevant that Misumi killed two people in Hokkaido in 1986 (this is the third murder, after all), or did Kore-eda just want an excuse to interject a lyrical, snowbound interlude into a musty murder mystery? “The Third Murder” poses a battery of intriguing rhetorical questions, which the characters often ask aloud and allow to hang in the air for a half-second too long. His conclusions are characteristically both compassionate and ambiguous, but the process of reaching them is far too labored for these thoughts to sink as deeply as they should, or as they have in so much of his previous work.
By the time the film lumbers into its lugubrious second half, Kore-eda is much less concerned with Misumi’s guilt than he is the nature of guilt itself, and how fallibly we decide to determine it. However, it isn’t long before the hardline attorney is forced to question if Misumi actually committed a crime at all. Shigemori is perfectly fine with that it’s his job to go with whatever version of the truth might spare his client the death penalty. The killer is all too happy to confess that he committed the crime, but when he meets his defense team - a scraggly trio led by a suave lawyer named Shigemori (“Like Father, Like Son” actor Masaharu Fukuyama) - he starts to change his story. It begins in a cold ditch on a dark night, as a man named Misumi (the great Kôji Yakusho) conks his boss on the back of the head and lights his body on fire. A harsh and largely unwelcome change of pace from Japan’s greatest living humanist filmmaker, “ The Third Murder” finds Hirokazu Kore-eda abandoning the warmth of his recent family dramas (“Still Walking,” “After the Storm”) in favor of an ice-cold legal thriller that pedagogically dismantles the death penalty.
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