Suspect X

A body is found; the face crushed, the hands burned, the identity impossible to establish. The cause of death is strangulation. The police find the dead man's former wife: Yasuko works at a restaurant and lives with her daughter. The man had been harassing them. Yasuko has a witness and her timeline holds. Her neighbour Ishigami is a mathematics teacher; quiet, alone and extremely clever. Yukawa, a physicist called in as a police adviser, knows Ishigami from university. The two men come face to face and the matter stops being a murder investigation. Hiroshi Nishitani directs. Masaharu Fukuyama plays Yukawa and Ko Shibasaki plays Yasuko. The source is Keigo Higashino's novel. The novel won one of the major crime prizes in Japan and was translated into many languages. The film was made as a continuation of a television series adapted from the same author. Its form is the inverted detective story; who the killer is is known from the start and the question is how they will be caught. The matter at its centre is built like a mathematics problem; the arrangement Ishigami sets up is a game with evidence. The narrative explains the reason for the crime in its last section, and that explanation is its real blow. Its limit is pace; the narrative is slow and there are few scenes of tension. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese crime fiction and mysteries with clever construction. Who it is not for: it is slow, has no action, and the ending is emotionally heavy.