Tetsuya Nakashima’s films are growing increasingly dark and disturbed. 2004’s Kamikaze Girls was a candy-coloured poptastic riot; Memories of Matsuko, in 2006, was a tale of mental collapse leavened by surrealistic flights into a more cheerful dreamworld; Confessions – now slated to be Japan’s official entry in this year’s Oscars – is a tightly controlled, vicious and intense account of cruelty, murder and revenge. It might be built out of some fairly standard Japanese movie furniture – a school setting, a smart-but-evil boy, bullying, a mobile phone-mediated and death-fetishising youth culture – yet it’s a work of powerful originality and psychological truth.