The thing about going on holiday and long flights, is that there usually is a big selection of movies available to watch. Of course you have the big blockbusters, but also titles you’ve never heard of before. Unconfessional was one of those titles I found underneath the Korean movies section. And as you can’t quickly check IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes while flying to see if it’s worth watching, it gave me the feeling of visiting a rental store and picking a movie purely based on it’s picture and a short description.
Unconfessional is about a director Youn Byungcheon (Seong-woo Bae) who invites a teenager to his home for an interview for a role in his latest film. He films the conversation, but soon the director seems to have another reason to invite this young man. At one point the boy is tied up and the director tries to get him to confess to something he might have done.
Unconfessional is an unpredictable film, in which the one in control sometimes changes quickly and stories are told from different perspectives like the classic Kurosawa film Rashomon. Unfortunately, it is not a film that is of high quality all the way through, but I think I can partly blame it on the fairly poor translations. Which were not only textually sloppy, but sometimes disappeared so quickly that you could not read them completely. Yet there is a constant tension and you wonder as a viewer what exactly is the truth and how it will eventually end. Maybe not a title that I might have watched, had I checked IMDb, but fortunately not so bad that I regretted having watched it.
