Get Reel | Film review: The Snow White Murder Case shows many sides of a murder mystery
Two films with connections to Confessions, director Tetsuya Nakashima's 2010 adaptation of housewife-turned-writer Kanae Minato's debut novel, have made it into Hong Kong cinemas this month. Two weeks ago, Nakashima's The World of Kanako, another crime drama about adolescent girls and the strange closed-off realm they inhabit, arrived here.
Starring: Mao Inoue, Go Ayano, Misako Renbutsu, Nanao
Director: Yoshihiro Nakamura
Category: IIB (Japanese)
Two films with connections to Confessions, director Tetsuya Nakashima's 2010 adaptation of housewife-turned-writer Kanae Minato's debut novel, have made it into Hong Kong cinemas this month. Two weeks ago, Nakashima's The World of Kanako, another crime drama about adolescent girls and the strange closed-off realm they inhabit, arrived here.
Now there's The Snow White Murder Case, Yoshihiro Nakamura's quality adaptation of another involving mystery-drama-thriller by Minato.
This haunting movie opens with the image of a bleeding body of a woman in a white dress; she has been stabbed more than 10 times, and her corpse was burned in a forested national park. Thought to have been as pretty as a fairy tale princess when alive, Noriko (Nanao) was an office worker at Hinode, a cosmetics company which manufactured the popular Snow White soap.
When another worker, Risako (Misako Renbutsu), contacts Yuji (Go Ayano), a friend who works at a TV station, and tells him that she is the prime suspect, he decides to interview her and other employees who knew Noriko and Miki Shirono (Mao Inoue), the plain Jane who, according to her gossipy co-workers, was upset that the man she loved (Nobuaki Kaneko) liked Noriko instead.
