If anyone can make a great Cancel Culture movie, it would have to be Takashi Miike, right? Sham is based on a true story, a court case from 2003 in which a teacher is accused of severely abusing one of his 9-year-old students. The film begins with the boy’s mother’s courtroom testimony, as she describes the sequence of events: the teacher is racist, stating that the boy, whose great-grandfather was American, has “tainted” blood which explains his stupidity; the teacher physically punishes the boy for minor classroom infractions (pinching his nose until it bleeds, lifting him up by the ears until they tear); and finally, after having been reported to the school authorities, the teacher finds the boy alone on his way home from school and tries to persuade him to jump off a building. This occupies Sham’s first 20 minutes, a harrowing account told in horror movie style, with the teacher’s face obscured by deep shadows when it isn’t flashing a menacingly psychotic grin.
The next 40 minutes then present the teacher’s version of these events, and they could not possibly be more different: the teacher is a nice family man who looks out for and is loved by his students, is gentle with his corrections, and is full of life, humor, and humility. Following this section, the final hour then follows the trial in which the truth is attempted to be discovered and established. Thus, we have a variation on the Rashomon structure, with two competing versions of the same events. But unlike Kurosawa, who was interested in the nature of truth and how people tell lies, even to themselves, and how we can function in a world where that is the case, Miike’s concerns are less cosmic. It’s clear which version of the truth he believes in, right from the start. While the opening 20 minutes operate as a horror movie, then the next 40 are shot without the filter of genre, the story of an ordinary man caught in a Kafka-esque sequence of accusations that he is increasingly unable to defend himself against. This isn’t a movie about the impossibility of truth; it’s a movie about a man who is accused of abuse not being given the benefit of the doubt.
Given the on-going revelations of the #MeToo movement within the Japanese film industry, where such high-profile filmmakers as Sion Sono and Tak Sakaguchi, among others, have been credibly accused of all kinds of harassment and abuse, it’s not encouraging to see a director of Miike’s obvious stature come out with a film that wants us to question whether we should, in fact, “believe women.” Which isn’t to say that Sham is not a good movie. In fact, it’s a terrific courtroom drama, a fine exercise in classical style from a man not known for making classical films of any kind. Coming on the heels of his boxing movie Blue Fight (aka Blazing Fists), it’s another surprising turn toward the conventional for Miike, one without any of that previous film’s small concessions to the director’s oddball quirks. But other than the fact that Sham is exceptionally well-crafted, and Miike remains among the most supremely competent filmmakers of our time, it’s a movie that could probably have been made by anyone, even Hirokazu Kore-eda.
As sturdy as it is, then, one must wonder why Miike chose to tell this story, at this time. Sham lacks any of the nuance or expressionism of Todd Field’s Tár, probably the only great film yet made about Cancel Culture, or the courtroom intensity of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, nor are its performances on the level of Sandra Hüller, Cate Blanchett, or Swann Arlaud in those films. Gô Ayano (A Bride for Rip Van Winkle) plays the teacher at an increasingly high emotional register as he pleads for the truth, and Kô Shibasaki (Battle Royale) seemingly has only one note as the mother leveling the accusations. Cold and emotionless, she leaves no doubt which of these characters is truly abusive and homicidal, giving us even less room to imagine than Miike does.
In the end, Sham is best described as a courtroom drama about how everyone (friends and coworkers, the media, the public at large, the legal system) is ready to believe the worst in people, regardless of the evidence, or lack thereof. It’s a true story: people do get falsely accused of things all the time. But it misses the point at issue in accusations of abuse: that narratives like the mother’s always get discounted, that institutions always protect their own, and that the public is always willing to turn a blind eye to the horrible things happening around them in favor of social stability. Cherry-picking a case like this one, and making a whole fancy movie about it, doesn’t refute any of those facts. The real question at issue in Sham, if we want to be generous to Miike — and perhaps there are those like this writer who may be too inclined to do so as fans of the director’s work in general — is not whether we can ever believe accusations of abuse, or if we should discount them more than we’re willing to, but rather how can we, as a society, construct a system wherein the truth can ultimately win out, where abusers will be punished and the innocent redeemed. The truly harrowing position of Sham is not that there’s no such thing as truth, but rather that there is truth, and we, as a flawed people, have yet to develop a system in which we can find it.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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