Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting.

Director Takashi Miike is one of the most prolific filmmakers in Japan. He has made over 100 films, turning out multiple films each year. I suppose having said that, you can’t really expect him to have a particular genre or style, but I booked this films mainly because of his early horror film Audition (1999).

Having just seen Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s tight and increasingly violent thriller, I was expecting something similar with Sham. A slow tightening of the screws in what starts out as a fairly conventional courtroom drama, based on a book Fabrication: The Truth About The ‘Murder Teacher’ in Fukuoka by Masumi Fukuda.

Seichii (Go Ayano) is a quietly spoken teacher in an elementary school. We are first introduced to the story that is at the heart of the court case when we see the testimony of the mother of one of his students play out. The mother, Mrs Himuro (Ko Shibasaki), accuses Seichii of bullying her son, Takuto (Kira Miura), by saying he has tainted blood because Mrs Himuro’s American grandfather and singling him out for physical punishments in the classroom.

It’s not a new technique to then show the same story from different view points, but it works quite well here. In the first telling, Seichii is angry and demeaning and clearly a bad person, to the point where Takuto attempts suicide. In Seichii’s retelling, we see him re-cast as the gentle and caring teacher that we start to believe may be his real self.

It reminded me of a few other films in the way it approaches its material. – The Hunt (2012), which has similar themes of an adult being demonised, because of the accusation of a child., and Monster, a story that also has multiple retellings that help us better understand what is happening. With the latter, one thing that was so strong about it was it’s focus on both the adults and the children of the story.

In Sham, we are really only interested in Seichii and his battle against Mrs Himuro. There are lengthy courtroom scenes, gradual reveals of information, and before long, we feel we understand where the truth lies.

I think what surprised me about it was how straight the story is told. There are no big twists or turns, there is no driving tension, just the anguish of a man feeling wronged and an ending that ties things up very neatly in a big bow.

The performances are good and there is a certain discomfort with sitting with the cultural manifestation of masculine emotion as hysteria and anguish where it would play out in many other countries as anger and violence.

It feels very Japanese in how it shows the importance of saving face and terror of public shame. There are some faint horror undertones with Mrs Himuro’s stilted gait and long, unblinking stare, and I found myself during its nearly 2 1/2 hour run time wishing that maybe we would get a sudden segue into something a little bit more Audition.