Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: SHAM [Tribeca Film Festival 2025 - New York, NY]

The essence of a narrative thriller depends on the inception point. With "Sham" [Spotlight Narrative], director Takashi Miike, known a lot for his more visceral action thrillers, instead takes on a courtroom drama of sorts involving a teacher who supposedly bullied and punished a student because of his non-pure Japanese blood. It is an interesting context to be sure and the story is based on a real life incident. But what Miike tends to do is play with the audience in the beginning to see if the perspective of an unreliable narrator per se (or perspective) is going to change the approach of the audience if the plot or its evidence if one should say is flopped on its head. At its core, the story is about whether people will continue believing something just because they think they have been shown it or if it actually happened. That mostly works in theater, film and television because it plays with the art of artifice. This in many ways also speaks to the encroaching element of AI because it is blurring the line between reality and what is actually happening forcing people to become divided simply by a lie.

The perspective here switches after what is considered the initial testimony to what might have actually happened. But that point is never made clear. Since this happened in 2003, there were no cameras to capture this kind of behavior and even now it might be considered an invasion of privacy. Kazuya Kamenashi plays the teacher in question and his behavior on both sides is not unbelievable but it doesn't quite paint what he actually did which of course is part of the point. At one point, his teacher is told to apologize for something he may or may not have done. It is simply based in perspective and also mired in internal school politics which of course happens in every country. The film is a slow boil which makes it trudge along in certain points of the mundane despite the fact that what the protagonist might be doing is right or wrong. On the reverse, the mother and the son who were considered empathetic in the beginning or now seen as more vicious or deliberate people. Whichever person is right, the movie is content to play with people's expectation or what they think but ultimately it is not as muich as mystery as a thumb to what we expect as human beings. There is some beauty in it but more than a little chicanery. B-

By Tim Wassberg